Precursors
by Yugoslavia
Summary: Commander Mars learns a haunting secret about her origins, one that will shape the future when she meets a long lost friend. A request by Desiree-U.
1. Prologue

_**From the journal entries of Commander Mars**_

 _Dear journal,_

 _I've made a disturbing discovery._

* * *

"How can that thing be considered a Pokemon? It's vile."

"Not all the creatures of the earth have the grace and beauty that you do, darling."

* * *

 _I hate talking about my mother. I hate it for the same reason I often hate writing these journal entries, it's the gateway to my own pretentious tendencies. Blaming everything on my mother, how I was raised and the very nature in my bones is one of the great horrors of writing. It's the very nature of my pretentiousness, it's what tears me apart. I hate it, damn it all, but I have to._

 _There are times we have to discuss what irks us the most._

 _Sometimes, most all times, we need to let out the most disturbing things we've discovered, even ones about ourselves. There are unfortunate realities that do exist, and we occasionally cross over into those dark places. There are things that are too strange to be processed alone._

* * *

"That's a disturbing thought, Ari."

On the floor, kneeling, Ariana stroked the plumy, fleshy pads of Vileplume's flowery crown. She grinned through full lips, hearing gentle coos emit deep in Vileplume's mouth-less chest as she worked her fingers deep and massaged him. Sighing, she slid further down towards the floor, sitting on her rear in her labcoat-like uniform, folding her glossy white boots beneath her as she rested. A set of glossy, candy red fingernails scratched and tickled beneath the 'leaves' of Vileplume's body, her eyes wandering over the psychedelic, mustard colored spots that adorned his body.

"It is," Ariana smiled, letting her red eyes flare up to Archer.

* * *

 _In the summers, I take my trips to Johto. One a year, every year._ _I had never gone as Commander Mars._

 _It's the same. I stay in the same, old hotel on the outskirts of Cherrygrove and ask for a room where the pink cherry trees face the old, papery windows, overlooking the city with so many creeks interwoven through it. I visit the same sushi restaurant towards the southeast entrance off Route 43. I rent a bike from the same shop, and take it touring the western coast by the Tidal Caves and the whirlpools. I buy from the same brewer of Sake in the north and take it to my hotel, watching the same romance movies on tape._

 _There are so few times where I take a trip on Team Galactic business, and they are usually in cataclysmic circumstances. The Floaroma Windworks come to mind. Frankly, the only feeling I had is a feeling of dread for what a trip to Johto meant. I could only dread what it meant to be in a place of such relaxation, such history and serenity, and desecrate it. Yes, Johto has a lot of other meaning to me—lots of meaning to me—but I had given it lots of new meaning. It was a vacation spot to be free, and in all honesty, I do get a bit nostalgic for the past. It's just nice, now, to put some distance between it. Some good, healthy distance._

* * *

Archer sat on the edge of the table, holding a mug by the curled handle and balancing it on the center of a plate in his other hand. His nose wrinkled, taking in the scent of freshly brewed black coffee.

"Have you thought about changing careers?"

Raising an eyebrow, Archer turned his frigid blue eyes to Ariana, taking a long sip of his boiling hot coffee expressionlessly. The cup rested in the carved space in the center of the plate in his hand, and then was set on the table beside him. He held the table he sat on gently, running his fingers on the black rubber spacer that wrapped around the edge of the table, and then crossing his legs.

"Is it on your mind?" Archer asked pensively.

Ariana had coereced Vileplume to lay on his side as much as he could, resting on his plumy crown of petals. Her fingers danced around his pill-shaped, blue body, teasing and massaging Vileplume to get more of the light exasperated sighs that echoed through his tiny body. Her own head tilted softly, lost in thought.

"Not really."

"Then why ask me?" asked Archer.

Ariana chuckled in amusement, looking up with a gleam of inspiration wheeling in hereyes. "A couple Poke for your thoughts, I suppose."

Archer pursed his lips, his eyes wandering down to meet Vileplume's, giving a flat stare.

* * *

 _And what of this past? Well l_ _et's start from the beginning._

 _My mother was a Team Rocket Executive, tasked with all the individual operations in their criminal activities, stationed in the Johto region. When the Rockets had been kicked out of Kanto by some unknown debacle, they resumed activities in its neighbor, the Johto region. I wouldn't be lying if I said my mother headed up a lot of the organization in the area, but I'm just not certain. It was shared leadership, but at the time there was no higher-up. My mother shared her responsibilities with Team Rocket Executives. There were three others._

 _Let's go a little further back._

 _During Team Rocket's reign over the Kanto region, the height of their criminal activities and influence, is when the Johto chapter was started. Johto was a small, fully-fledged operation headed by a group of many executives, 'The Original Four', they were called. My mother, Ariana, was not a part of The Original Four._

 _My mother was a nurse during those times. She met a man in those days, a man named Giovanni, my father._

 _I have no idea how Giovanni seduced my mother to his side. Until then, I had known my mother not to have a cruel bone in her body, an ounce of evil in her to tide over the calm, collected person she was. I have never met Giovanni, at least in person, even though I have his blood coarsing through my body and his inherent traits. I know Giovanni must be powerful, an willful man who could turn the greatest men and women into the greatest servants and slaves, cowards to obey his will. How else could Team Rocket have done so much damage to the Kanto region? How else could he have turned my mother to the dark side?_

* * *

"What I have hoped for in the short term is significantly different from what I have planned in the future," mused Archer, features soft as he stared at the floor in thought. He shook his head. "There are no immediate plans, no..."

"Then I guess I'm asking about the future," said Ariana.

"The future? Who can know the future? There are no facts about the future... We can only hypothesize, use clever insight and cunning conjectures..."

From behind Ariana, resting upright only a foot away from where she had slouched to the carpeted floor, a white leather purse rested. Fumbling for it, Ariana undid the zipper gracefully, rooting through it only momentarily as she knew exactly what she was looking for. She felt the plastic wrap graze her fingers, clutching the small wrapped package as she pulled it from the purse and set it on her knee, pulling the zipper up once more. The package was white, candy bar shaped, a barcode and several indiscernable markings printed onto the glossy surface.

"I know, but we can hope," Ariana said, mildly teasing with an impatient voice. She opened the plastic-wrapped package, unsheathing a tightly packed cluster of brown nutrients and grains—a nutrition bar for Pokemon. Breaking off a small, round chunk of the sandy substance, she handed it over to Vileplume, who caught it in-between his tiny, stubby arms.

"Well, only Giovanni can know the future, I suppose..."

* * *

 _Such a dark, harrowing and horrific possibility. It haunts me.  
_

* * *

Taking a deep, airy breath through her nostrils, Ariana's eyes flared up to Archer, locking with his eyes for several long, strained moments. She clutched the nutrition bar, still where she was, continuing to stay on the floor, staring up mercifully.

Archer looked down sagely, then hung his head.

"Some Poke for my thoughts..." repeated Archer. His fingers clamped around edge of the coffee-filled mug, still steaming and hot, bringing the mug around and then lifting it to his lips as he took a long draw.

* * *

 _There were many stories about who my mother and father were. The more I try to write them, the more they start to feel like excuses. I've heard many stories, explanations for something I could've never experienced: a time when my mother and father were in love._

 _Let's go further back again._ _  
_

 _This is not the first time Giovanni and my mother had met. Growing up, my mother had been incredibly poor. Her family had come from a distant land I had never heard of, but she had made it to Johto for some excuse that made little sense to me at the time. I had heard stories that her father—my grandfather—had served in the Great War, and wanted to stay somewhere peaceful, so they had chosen the safe haven of Johto over the war-torn, nearly destroyed Kanto. Growing up, that meant they had very little, and for as often as I forget, I do know that Pokemon training was completely different for a people who were just learning the craft. My mother had always told me that Pokemon had helped work the land and sustain them, both dire and beautiful helpers. Though Johto is the great center of the arts as it always has been, it was built on rural ground, and it was ground that my family so long ago staked out for themselves and soon my mother and I. When they pulled together to send my mother to school, they were incredibly poor._

 _Giovanni was not, or at least hid it very well. He was poor but had made sustainable choices with his life. He was savvy, and able to survive on that, so he shared that ability with my mother. There is so little I know about him, where he came from and who he truly was, and that truly is a shame. I do know that he is how my mother survived her childhood, her young years, and her early adulthood._

 _The breaking point for this relationship was when my mother decided to go down the path of nursing, and Giovanni more or less stayed where he was. The point where my mother returned was when it had failed her._

 _She was broke, overworked, and more importantly purposeless. She wanted children. She wanted to do better on how her parents had lived and died. She wasn't heading that way._

 _Giovanni gave her that.  
_

* * *

"I want a lawn, when I get older. I hope never to spend all the time that those fools in Kanto have, rotting away in some concrete box. No... I want to reflect on my sins in peace and quiet. I want to ruminate in a box bordered by a white picket fence... With a family... I want to die like everyone else..."

Ariana looked past Vileplume, past Archer's boots, looking under the table he sat and boring her gaze into the wall, lost in thought.

Past the red tips of Ariana's hair, Archer too stared off into space, unsure and lost in thought. "I don't want to die alone," said Archer, swallowing in earnest.

* * *

 _It made sense that my mother and father were together._

 _Perhaps this is why this discovery is so disturbing. I never dreamt she would have an affair so..._

 _So detailed._


	2. Chapter 1

**_Act 1_**

 _"And this is how I will die: sitting in front of a keyboard."_

 _—_ _Frank Arthur_

Mars' boots crunched on gravel, planted firmly as she stood in the empty field. She looked to the horizon, the hot Johto sun pounding her forehead, cooking her hair and forcing her to squint through to see the incredibly blue sky. Covering her eyes with a hand, Mars stared at the dark outline of a building, overshadowed by a wall of tall trees, the front of a forest that stretched expansively behind.

Behind her, the truck fired up, engine growling to life, wheels crackling with gravel beneath the thick tires as it pushed off, rolling down a thin country road that snaked away towards a field. It left Mars alone at the foot of a long, rocky and grassy expanse, rows of small shacks and houses behind her on the other side of the gravel road.

As Mars pushed off on her own, taking the first few steps towards the old shack ahead, she stopped dead in her tracks, the voice of someone hollering coming from behind.

"Hey! Rocket! Get out of our town, you swine!"

A can bounced inches from Mars' heel. After gazing down at the beaten, metallic can, she looked up, staring down the two people who were standing and watching from their decks, leaning over the wooden bannister with Pokeballs clutched in their hands, unmarked cans full of drinks resting beside them. On the porch steps, just in front of it, a Houndoom stalked the grounds in front of it, lanky body crossing beneath the leaning arms of the locals.

Mars turned, biting the inside of her cheek as she thought, furrowing her brow with concern. She continued to walk, despite further taunts from over her shoulder. She instead followed the sun and it's bright midday intensity, feeling it wash over her skin and cook it.

"We'll come after ya! There's prices on your head! You best stay out of our town, clear?"

Shaking her head, Mars looked to the dark outline of the shack ahead. "Well, at least I know I'm in the right place..." she said to herself.

* * *

The entrance to the shack had collapsed, taped off with 'Caution' tape in bright yellow. With the jagged boards that stuck up from what was once the floor, there was little to enter into anyway. Mars strayed, instead following the length of the dilapidated deck, following to where the shack backed up the forest. Something gleamed, catching her eye. The wide maw of a bear trap, teeth worn deep brown with thick rust and jagged edge from disuse, chained by the center strut to the place it was guarding, a wooden cellar door, complete with handles.

On Mars' wrist, she unstrapped the black felt fabric that covered her COMM, reaching beneath the wrist-bound device where the center metal lock fastened it to her. Small breaks in the plastic surface, seams where a thin strip of plastic lay were apparent as Mars ran her fingers over the glossy white surface. She pressed in on the strip, feeling a small resistance as a spring pushed it up, releasing several tabs from the inside and resting the plastic strip atop its former housing, a separate part. Grasping the strip between her fingers, Mars waved the small piece like a wand with the white cubic tip resting outward. A light flared inside the plastic, glowing red as several thin strands of red laser light emitted from the tip, scanning over the door in front of her. The outline of the mechanism below appeared in three-dimensional laser light, as well as the bright red center of a square insert—a button—built into the side of the cellar door.

Stepping around the bear trap, Mars leaned down, her fingers sliding along the rough, splintery surface as she strove to found a button, eventually finding a small cut piece of wood over where the button was. She pressed in, hearing a soft click.

The front of the cellar door flipped forward over the front, contrary to the dual door design of the facade, landing on the soft earth in front of it with a rickety thud. Instead, it served as a ramp over the bear trap, leading to a steel platform.

Mars stepped around the newly lifted platform, continuing to hold out the wand as she had to view the three-dimensional raster of laser light she had created by projection. Down below the platform of what she could see, she saw the faint shimmering outlines of a column that stretched, reaching down into the earth beyond where the projected images could show. She stepped to the lifted, raised trap door, walking over the gently warping wooden platform until she reached the very sturdy steel platform, feeling the studs make her flat boot sole rest unevenly.

The plastic wand in-between her fingers buzzed softly. Looking down, she saw the tip light and turn blue, removing the red laser raster projections from below her. Mars reached her COMM, sliding the plastic wand into the slot it had came from, pressing down to lock it in. The light on it faded out to regular plastic. Turning her arm to see the COMM, the screen had lit up, displaying an older interface.

'Team Galactic Johto Hideout: Access Granted'

* * *

The platform shook softly, pistons beneath it firing to life and testing their capacity as the locks released. Slowly, steadily, the platform lowered, taking Mars deep into the earth in a steel chute.

After moments of darkness, punctuated by the presence of small, miner-like lights that lined the platform-sized chute, a whoosh of air came from the edges of the chute as the platform entered the large expanse of the base. The platform moved slowly, drifting down towards the floor as it moved through a new chute with thick slabs of plexiglass surrounding on all sides.

Mars watched down by her legs as the new expansive room that she entered into was filled with light. Her boots lit like the morning sunrise, a shaft of light that covered them being raised as she passed down into the new chamber, rising up to the wide brim of her skirt and over her body. Her arms felt a tingling sensation of warmth as she passed through. She squinted, overwhelmed by the glowing light as it passed over face. With her arm outstretched in defense as she realized the surging power of the light, her eyes slowly opened, realizing that when passing through the roof of the new room she had passed extremely close to the massive mounted lights in the room.

The space below her was largely devoid and empty. As she scanned her surroundings, watching behind her as the metal belt of her lift platform reeled inside a metal track, bringing her closer to the ground, she could see nothing in the new space. It looked largely abandoned. The closer she got, the more her eyes focused on two solitary shadows approaching in the distance, in front of the opening to lift.

A new opening appeared in Mars' immediate vision: a break in the plexiglass wall ahead of her, cut with the curved upper opening of a doorway. Hesitantly, she stepped out, looking down at her new footstep while she still had one foot on the platform. She had stepped onto concrete, a distant echo resounded from her footstep as sound traveled in the gigantically empty space. She finished stepping off the lift, walking a few feet ahead of her, listening to her footsteps echo in the cavernous expanse, approaching the two solitary shadows ahead of her. There were no other landmarks, aside from the reflective glass platform chute behind her and the deep grooves in the concrete floor that formed a grid. From the north to the south, east to the west, Mars could see no walls. Even the ceiling, a bright cluster of white lights, had been reserved to a small square of light, leaving the entirety of the ceiling and remaining room in darkness.

Mars had paused in her tracks, only a dozen feet away from the platform, when she turned sharply, reaching for her utility belt. Her hand found its comfortable spot on the plastic surface of her Pokeball in its holster. As her eyes squinted, lips pursed in thought, Mars detached the Pokeball and held it in her hand, balancing the weight in her grasp. She clicked the release, feeling it rumble in her hand, moments before she tossed up towards the light, watching the sailing arc before it sailed back towards the ground by the glass chute and the platform. It bounced one, then exploded into light, the empty husk of the Pokeball closing together and rolling languidly towards Mars.

Mars, watching Purugly take shape and take in her surroundings, felt a subtle tap on her foot, then realized she had been staring past Purugly, letting time go on as she thought. She gazed down at the lonesome Pokeball that had arrived by the tip of her boot.

The Pokeball felt comfortable back in Mars' hand, though it had lost its weight and felt cold and empty. She carried it with her, Purugly walking just behind her with the soft clacking of her claws on concrete carrying through the air, thin breaths wheezing through her short, stubby nose. Mars carried a tired determination in her eyes, staring out and piercing the darkness as she walked ahead with nothing to see but the growing shadows.

A tall barricade of plastic monitors mounted on multiple iron posts stood on either side of Mars and Purugly—the dark shadows she had seen in the distance. Walking between them, Mars could see that the many linked monitors were not on, though the gentle whirring and tiny blinking lights of systems indicated something was still powered on. As Mars passed around the curved barricade of screens, she froze, seeing that inside the barricade of desks and systems was a chair with a person in it. On the oppposite side was an identical chair with a person in it. The first one she had seen, the one on the left, Mars walked to, closely inspecting the figure resting in the chair.

The first thing that drew Mars' eye was the shock of long, tangled green hair that came from the figure in the chair, dyed a bright neon green, but the more she took in the detail of the figure, she froze, eyes lighting with something more haunting. His eyes were covered by a plastic device, flat and oblong, a pair of rubbers seals holding it to the mans face. His lips were closed but peaceful, as if he had fallen asleep with the mask on. He lay in the leather chair, tilted back, his legs and feet resting on a footrest that resembled a plastic tray. Over on the desks that seemed to wall him in like an open-air cubicle were countless systems and interfaces Mars couldn't understand, and her eyes wandered back to the man in the chair, inspecting his clothing. He wore an identical uniform to Commander Saturn, dressed in long mesh pants and a reflective white fabric vest over the mesh shirt, a Team Galactic 'G' stitched over his collarbone.

As Mars inspected the man with furrowed brow, mentally trying to piece together what had or was happening here, Purugly nosed around the body in the chair, opposite the one Mars was tending to. Purugly sniffed, finding her uniform unappealing, but moving her head to the effeminante hand that rested on the edge of the armrest, her fat tongue lifting softly at the fingers before moving on to the desk. She bumped the table with a loud thud, sharply moving backwards and turning away from the figure and towards Mars, but not before her paw snagged on a cord. Around the wide metal base of the resting chair snaked several dozen black cords over the concrete floor. Purugly's paw lifted with the black cord tangled over it, sharply pulling the cable end from the socket.

The sound of something powering down came from the computerized systems. Sharply, the tiny fans whirred to life in the core systems and monitors lit up with dull blue light. A hydraulic wheezing came from the chair as it lifted forward, the chair legs folding down to the base. A craining arm of aluminum lowered from overhead, finding a plastic disk in the center of the device that covered the figure's eyes. Slowly, the figure began to reanimate, coming back to life.

Mars continued to inspect her figure, the other man in the chair. She had leaned over his chest, listening to his slowed breathing patterns to ensure he was still alive. She heard Purugly scrambling behind her, thumping against the racks of monitors as she left the area. She didn't look up, too lost in thought to consider it.

Then, Mars heard a few footsteps behind her, a figure entering in. Lifting herself upright slowly, she looked, aghast at the awakened figure.

"Commander Mars, you're a welcome sight."

Standing tall, draped in a long white lab coat that draped over her like a ghost, the woman stood staggeringly. Her skin was a deep dark shade, rich with color and texture, her features soft and determined. Her deep hazel eyes shimmered through the haze of exhaustion, looking kindly at Mars. She gave a wide smile, youth glowing through her. Atop her head she had a wavy, curling and combed mess of shortly trimmed brunette hair, completely trimmed from the sides of her head and behind her head in a pompadour like effect. Through the lab coat she had draped over her moments earlier covered the majority of her body, a white plate of armor over her chest gleamed in the dim lighting, the same glossy white shade as her armored boots, as well as the traditional black uniform of a Galactic officer.

Mars stepped forward hesitantly, offering her hand to shake, meeting the woman's smile with one of her own. "Awhile, Sedna?" said Mars, keeping her voice at a hushed tone.

Commander Sedna laughed, smiling ear to ear, her plum-colored lipstick visible. "It only feels like a million years, you're getting sentimental, soft," she chuckled. Her eyes peered over Mars' shoulder, gazing at the hulking beast that had noisily crawled through the desk spaces, claws skittering on the floor. "And who might this cutie be?" she asked.

Over her own shoulder, Mars briefly glanced at Purugly. She then folded her arms, looking back to Sedna. She looked at her boots, shuffling silently as the sound of Purugly noisily licking the man's fingers filled her ears.

"Purugly? Oh, y'know... She's standard issue I guess, with a couple of hidden tricks up her sleeve," said Mars.

"So that's what a 'Purugly' looks like. I figured you might've let a shiny Persian let its eating habits take its course. She really is a beautiful creature... We don't see too many Pokemon these days, beyond our own anyway."

Mars had payed little attention to what Sedna was saying. Her focus was over her shoulder, staring down Purugly as the beastly Pokemon hungrily licked the young man's fingers. At first she snapped her fingers, but then she clapped her hands, whistling in chirps to attract Purugly's attention, making little progress. Finally, Mars started walking her way, watching Purugly lurch and start to race around the tilted back chair that the man rested on, her back slinking around as she licked her lips noisily and defiantly. Mars continued to follow closely, kicking the scrambling paws of Purugly as she nudged her out and away from the resting chair.

As Purugly scrambled ahead, lumbering along a few short feet ahead, she walked slowly with slinking, cautious steps, her luminous yellow eyes staring up to Mars every so often in defiance as she walked into the empty depths of the room. Her gray-striped body eventually disappeared into the dark depths of the room, leaving her to linger outside the realm of visibility for Sedna and Mars.

Mars stopped at the entrance to the enclosure of desks, staring off at Purugly as she walked off into the darkness, mulling over several questions silently as her red eyes raced. She heard a chuckling from the corner, and then watched as Sedna walked in front of her, passing ahead and walking into the space of the desks. Momentarily, Mars stared ahead, seeing that Purugly had disappeared out into the darkness, listening as Sedna paced behind her.

"You know it's a rare occasion to be getting a Galactic Commander," said Sedna, raising her brows high and poised as she formed her phrasing.

"Don't you live with one?" asked Mars.

Sedna chuckled, shaking her head. "No, it's not like that. Your last visit here was nine months ago. I half-expected never to see you again, at least around my neck of the woods."

"I'd hope I'd have kept my job."

"It's not like that either. I just know that the Johto project isn't on the top list of Cyrus' priorities. I know, we all know."

Mars turned, looking up to Sedna.

"You're here to fire me, aren't you?"

* * *

 _I'm not an alcoholic, but I've written drunk before. Here's another example._

 _I'm sad that I'm drinking alone, but I am enjoying the hell out of myself as I do so. Commander Sedna can recommend a mean drink. I've never been a fan of the more bitter alcohols—alcoholic—beverages. The reality is that I'm a huge softie when it comes to this stuff. That said—knowing I'm a lightweight—it was a bad decision to drink a third of the gift brandy. I'm still drinking._

 _It is rather unfortunate that she can't be here to share this with me. Maybe that's why I'm writing this now._

* * *

"I guess I expected this," said Sedna.

Mars paced around the reclined chair, her arms crossed, one arm resting upright as her thumbnail picked and prodded at her lip. She shut her eyes, resting against the desk's edge where the majority of the computer systems were. When she opened her eyes, she was staring at the floor, her eyes lost in the deeply tangled mess of black cables that ran along the floor.

Sedna stepped forward, stooping and trying to catch Mars' line of sight. "Hey?" she asked. "Do you have some kind of prepared statement for me? For us?"

"Us?" asked Mars blankly, her rear teeth grinding as she thought.

"If you have something to say, I want him awake to hear it," said Sedna, defiance appearing in her tone for the first time.

* * *

 _It's really friggin' cold in November. Plus, my new place has a draft, a crazy one they could've mentioned when I was purchasing the damn thing. I did get a screaming deal, though the guy I know who got me that deal, the landlord, is no longer around. In fact, I'd rather not speak with him at all these days. I don't think I have too many new words for that thought, considering I dumped about thirty pages per journal over the course of two journals. Now that is unfortunate, more unfortunate than this draft._

 _Still, it's given me an excuse to finally buy some wooly, thick socks. It's given me an excuse to bring a blanket onto the couch to watch movies late at night. Heck, it's given me an excuse to buy a couch. Saturn's couch, six years later, two Galactic apartments, a homicidal roommate and this space accounted for, has finally met it's bitter end. It needed to happen, leather is too cold for a drafty apartment. Failed career opportunity #3's discount has finally kicked in, and six to eight weeks later my new apartment has a couch. It's motivating in an ass-backwards sort of way. Maybe I could have a fireplace by Valentine's Day. It's given me an excuse to be warm, to enjoy myself and not try to return to my hobby of disarming Galactic bombs for International Police cash. To rent some good movies and fall asleep on the couch with the space heater next to me. I haven't read or written a journal entry in three weeks, and it feels good to be away, but even better to return to what was good about these._

 _I mean, we could start with the basics: my job at the adult video store gives me menial income and a fantastic employee discount I might never use, things did go to shit with my last roommate, but I haven't heard from him in a good month, so there's that. I've also got a kick-ass thing of brandy and a good excuse to start drinking it._

 _It's been incredibly tempting to crack open the bottle. Unbelievably, excitingly, teasingly tempting, considering that things go cold on the Eastside in about mid-October, then goes to freeze-your-tits-off about November 1st. I'm not even a drinker, but I know that alcohol makes you feel warm when you're not. I've lugged around Sedna's gift bottle for the past four years, but only now have I truly felt the need to enjoy it._

 _Today, this anniversary date to which I drink so proudly to, a year of living in Unova._

* * *

Sedna hovered over the computer terminal, her fingers resting on the home keys of an old plastic keyboard bolted down to the desk by thick plastic straps. Inches from her shoulder, Mars stood, still leaning against the desk's edge and not moving. She hesitated to fire up the computer, but looked the desk, feeling her boots rest awkwardly between trails of cables. The gentle whirring of a cooling fan reached her ear as she waited momentarily, the squatted down, crawling beneath the desk.

"Who are we waking up?" asked Mars.

Halfway between grunting, groaning at the difficult reach her arm was making to secure a few cables to a mounted computer tower, Sedna let out a chuckle. Her fingers curled over the edge of the desk, her body quickly swinging out from beneath the desk and landing on her heels as her legs straightened. She took a breath, reaching for the mouse of the computer and waving it over the bolted, mothridden and tattered mousepad.

"You don't know? Mars, c'mon. Who's the other Johtoan Commander?" Sedna smiled light and playfully despite the circumstances.

A whirring fired up inside the many linked computers. All around them, monitors fired up one by one, turning a glowing shade of black before displaying an infinitude of lines of information, details on the running, carefully controlled experiment. A window pulled up, a diagram of a person outlined in an inset, vitals being tracked with incredible precision and detail.

"It's Vesta," said Sedna. "Commander Vesta, Commander Sedna."

* * *

 _I feel as though I could look at her right now and say, 'Oh, you'll be dead soon'. That's what I did to her, might as well continue that same thread of bizarre illogic that happened that day. It seems so soon too, like it might've been yesterday, today, or even unfolding right now. Commander Sedna is dead._

 _I used to lament on how hard it was to live on one's own. Everyday, when I sat down on that cold basement floor and folded my legs together beneath me, resting the pen and notebook in my lap or eventually the portable keyboard, transcribing digital logs to add to the wealth of ideas and memories I had created during my Galactic days and ever since, I always slipped in a line about how hard it was to leave, and how hard it was to continue on where I was now. It's a strange thing to consider that when you continually move on—continue—you have to leave that continuation behind—to continue. The newest is already getting older, you're always a step behind by moving forward. That's how I approach all of this now, knowing that it's the truth but never conquering that truth. That's how I approach the hard things, like death, suffering and meaninglessness. True ennui, as it were._

 _Some things don't change, though. A lot of things don't change. I write the same as I did six, seven, ten years ago. I get into little ruts, little habits and reoccurances, but those finish and everything loops back to what things were before._

 _I was incredibly excited to get a new apartment. Away from all this—nonsense, living with a landlord, going on inane adventures with his son and an incredibly disgruntled International Police officer—all the things that seemed so horrendous about living on my own in Unova that continually plagued me, the only things that were, not just the bad things in a mix of good things. It was all bad so far, and things were going to get better. Still, it was bizarre to me that I couldn't seemingly get 'over' myself. I seemed to scare myself at night._

 _I liked living by myself, I knew that from the beginning, but I also know now that I had a totally different version set in my mind as this. For one, I had Purugly living with me. This is no longer the case, and if I hadn't lost her like I did this may have been much easier. Now it's incredibly hard._

 _At nights I hear the growl of something... Awful. I know it's the kind of awful that only forty year old heating systems can provide, but it's incredibly hard to tell the difference when it's completely dark. This sounds like something... Else._

 _Never has a room been darker than my bedroom at night. It's like staring into the yawning chasm of nothingness that all this was born out of. It reminds me that, like we once were nothing, we soon shall be that nothingness._

* * *

Sedna's fingers clacked loudly on the keyboard, tapping like a machine gun as she flew through menus. When she had all but given up, she keyed up a command prompt, the ominous black window hanging on the screen as she typed in a long string of indiscernable text in the form of key commands and modifiers.

When she had punched in the correct codes she had memorized, a large, off-color blue window appeared in the dead center of every monitor, overlapping every single window on the screen, a window unlike any other on screen. A bright red border surrounded the box, text of the same shade of red sitting in the center of the screen.

'Confirm Subject Disengagement'.

Sedna keyed in her passcode.

* * *

 _It reminds me of the first nights after my mother had left._

* * *

An iron whine filled the room, echoing off infathomably distant walls. Old iron plating scraped and squealed against one another as the chair lifted, moving parts that hadn't been used in months, locked in a position. The chair lifted, straightening into a normal chair, taking the limp subject up with it.

This was the first time Mars had noticed how gaunt the figure was. Commander Vesta was incredibly thin, looking malnourished, underfed and have had experienced little activity for a long period of time. The chair as it lifted moved him with little resistance, and as Mars stared in curiosity, confused though she hadn't seen Sedna reawaken, she realized that she had no idea what she was in for. Responsively, she stepped away from the edge of the chair as it lowered, the tray carrying his resting legs and feet lowering and snapping down below his seat in a normal position.

Sedna too had watched, a mixed bag of emotions appearing to stir deep inside her. On screen behind her, a new message appeared, a loading bar moving at an incredibly slow crawl. As Sedna turned to watch the screen, hunched over the desk with her palms resting flat on the table as she stared deep into the screen, the bluish light awash over her skin, a new menu appeared. This one too had a loading bar, and in response, a small motor gave a high-pitched squeal as it roared to life.

* * *

 _When my mother first left, taken by the International Police, I truly didn't understand a thing about what was happening. It seemed to me that, while my mother was a criminal and the police were just cracking down on the sins of Team Rocket in a fairly logical sense, my mother was still a morally upstanding person. She just hid behind the face—the facade—of a criminal._

 _That's when I saw behind the mask. I saw what it truly meant to have a shell, a husk of a former life, because I was now living in it. I lived in a house that was completely empty, devoid of life with the markings, remnants of a life that had formerly existed inside of it. That life, my life too, they were no more, they were taken._

 _I didn't understand because I was young, and there was so much more to it. I was 17, and there are a lot of things one can't understand at that age._

 _I wasn't an adult, but the house was mine. The old, abandoned house that I didn't want was mine. It was my empty shell to live in, the inheritance of my mother. I suppose I should count myself lucky, that I really should've been shipped off to an orphanage for a single year that would determine the course of my life. I had no aunts and uncles, no grandparents to note. My mother would never have given me to my father even if it was an option. I don't know why she had requested a DNA test too, especially when we knew Giovanni was my father._

* * *

Sedna, lingering over the pages that printed out on the old, beaten office printer that rested at the capstone of the desk, her eyes wandered over the pages as she inspected the thin strands of text. Her head turned as she heard the whooshing, firing of hydraulic arms as they lowered.

Above the top of Commander Vesta's head, a white-painted metal arm descended from the ceiling on an armature base, built to and mounted on a crown of many other arms for different functions. The metal claws on the end of the arm moved forward with precision, finding the round interface port panel on the center of the visor attached to Vesta's eyes and sliding into the inserts. After a few clicks and releases, the rubber seal around the visor released with a hiss. The visor backed away from Vesta's face rising skyward with the remaining base. Hidden beneath where Mars had seen, several restraints holding his wrists and torso in place slid back and released him, leaving him to limply sit in the chair.

* * *

 _So here's to a year. Here's to another year, in fact. Here's to the rest of them._

* * *

Sedna had come to Vesta's side, leaning on the armrest of the chair. Her fingers laced through the long, deep green hair on his head, softly jostling his hair awake. Deep beneath his eyelids, Vesta's eyes raced, twitching on the surface where Sedna could see. Her head tilted onto her shoulder as she watched him stir.

Though Mars had been watching from where she was, she turned her focus to other things, walking along the front of the chair and passing close to the desk. Closely, her eyes wafted over the minute details of the desk, the system interfaces with the computer, scattered notes and sheets of information in neatly stacked piles, outlined in grids on the computer. The printed text on the pages were cryptic, scattered across wide spaces of white on the sheet with no intelligible wording on them. Some were tightly packed into rectangles or other abstract shapes, some lines of text going in circles or crossing between one another. A few had lots of notes scribbled in red pen, circling strands of text and other unrecognizeable characters and linking them to different ones. One sheet of paper had been taped to the bottom of a monitor, a sentence reading 'went to the first' had been circled and linked to another word, 'away'. The date had been written on it, a date several years ago.

Beside where Mars stood, the tall cubic printer spat out sheet after sheet, amassing a thick stack of white pages, dense black text scrawled across the page in tightly packed lines—sentences and paragraphs. Page after page scrolled out of the printer, the motors whirring deep inside the thick plastic casing. Leaning over, Mars read the crystal blue LCD, reading '189 of 343', with the number rapidly climbing up. A page tacked to a cabinet beneath the printer caught Mars' eye, one labeled 'Completed'.

* * *

 _Up, down, left and right; north, south, east and west, time only flows one direction. No decision can change that. None. It will always flow. The flow of time is always cruel._

 _Those are things that are easy to say now. It's harder to say when time is honestly cruel, easier to say when it seems like its cruelty is a myth. Because, no matter how soon we feel a moment is at it's pinnacle, that the story of something has ended and we stand in a moment disjointed from that narrative, it's not true. It can't be true. There is no such thing as a moment without narrative. There is no such thing as a life without adventure. I know that, though I seem to be at rest, free of the burdens of previous adventures, I know that there is another adventure coming. I am still a part of a moment in time that can just as easily be weaved into another narrative, with it's own harrowing outcomes. I know for certain that there are no happy endings to a reality like this._

 _We are all just precursors to some greater fate. We are part of an adventure that began long ago and still continues deep within us. Someone has come before us, and we will come before someone else._

* * *

"S-Sedna..."

Mars' head turned up, looking to where Sedna and Vesta sat in the center of the space, a radiant spotlight shining down on the two of them from the armature above.

Vesta sat up as much as he could in the chair, blinking profusely as he woke from sleep, looking blankly up into the darkness above. His arms fidgited on the chair's armrest, lifting himself to sit more upright, pausing when Sedna reached and interveined, helping him upright im the chair but keeping him steady. Sleepily, half-consciously, Vesta became acclimated to Sedna's help and watched her, almost amazed to see her.

Squinting, watching Vesta stare blankly at Sedna, almost past her, Mars observed carefully. It was then that she realized that Vesta was temporarily blind, his eyes going cross-eyed as he tried looking at the sound of Sedna's whispered voice.

Mars walked carefully, stepping into the golden halo of light that both Sedna and Vesta bathed in. Her arms crossed, her face placid as she stared down at Vesta, watching his head tip back as he rested in the chair.

"How long before he regains his sight?" asked Mars.

Vesta's arm jolted in the armrest, his hands grasping for the ends of the rest as he had become startled very easily.

Though her eyes lingered over Vesta's, watching him stare blankly up in a vain attempt to see the source of Mars' voice, Sedna eventually turned her head over her shoulder, staring grimly, solemnly at Mars. She stared for moments, letting her hands run over Vesta's shoulder and chest, comforting him softly. As she turned back to look at Vesta, she cleared her throat softly.

"Soon. Give him about an hour," she replied.

Mars, looking one last time up at Vesta, nodded softly. Stepping away, Mars lingered back towards the desk, letting Sedna and Vesta share their moment together. The printer still drew her attention, and she passed beside it, closely. The whirring of the motors deep inside the printer casing had ended, leaving a fresh, warm stack of papers atop the printer tray. Though Mars looked to the two commanders, watching them stir in silence, speaking only in hushed tones to one another and comforting one another with soft touches, Mars looked down at the printer, admiring the stack of pages. She folded them into her hands, straightening them with her palms and holding the stack in front of her, reading the first page.

* * *

 _'2/23/10 — Expedition and Observation of The Time Beast'_


	3. Chapter 2

_"An unfinished thought is like an unfinished love affair."_

 _—Pilus_

"But kids are so messy. They take hours to clean, and then they mess themselves again! They actively want to destroy your efforts to better them."

Ariana smiled softly, folding the collared, powder blue shirt in her hands and stacking it on a chair beside her. From the stacks of clothes resting at the end of the ironing board, Ariana leafed through the shirts carefully, shaking loose a thin white shirt from the bottom third, and then undid the inordinately buttoned front of the shirt, spreading it over the narrow surface of the ironing board's end, resting the back squarely. Grasping the iron, she let off a bit of steam, the iron plate on the iron gasping with hot air as she tipped it down, ironing out the wrinkles on the back of the tiny shirt.

Raising her eyebrows sharply as she gazed down at her work, a hesitant smile curled on her cherry red lips. "So," Ariana began, "you want out of this little task I have for you? Is that the underlying message here?"

Archer rubbed his lips, slipping his fingers in to massage the gums of his rear teeth as he thought, an arm crossed in front of his torso defensively. A tired chill crossed over his spine, making his eyelids flutter in exhaustion.

"No, that's not at all what I meant. I mean to say that it seems so trivial, all the effort you put into a little... _thing_... who takes from you on a financial and emotional level," said Archer. "I'll still do it, I just wanted to say something about it first."

Flipping the shirt over so that the sleeve tucked over the side of the shirt, doing the right front of the shirt, Ariana let out a chuckle before gliding the steaming iron over creases and wrinkles. She eyed Archer through the corner of her brow, turning her body to see the remaining creases that hid beneath the sleeve. After she finished the section of shirt, she rested the flat plastic end of the iron so that it stood upright atop the shirt, passing her leg over the dangling cable of the iron as she grasped for her coffee, taking a long drag of the steaming drink and then returning to the iron.

"I don't know why I keep you around," said Ariana, letting out a forced but satisfied sigh from her coffee.

"Why, me? Is it that bizarre?"

"It's bizarre that I invite you over for these... 'Nights'... Then we wake up, have coffee, and I listen to you criticize my lifestyle and choices, as well as any favor I ever ask of you!"

Archer looked taken aback, furrowing his brow and cocking his head as Ariana hastily finished another section of the small, wrinkled shirt.

"Is something the matter?" asked Archer.

* * *

 _In the beginning there was a tall ship, moving placidly through a dark ocean. I had no task on the ship. I was sat on the bow to watch us move. This took hours._

* * *

Mars uncrossed her legs, straightening them as they dangled and closing the stack of pages she was reading. At the bottom of the current page she was on she slipped a small paper clip, then returned the stack beside her on the desk she was sitting on.

The pair of footsteps clapping on the stone floor approached steadily, moving through the darkness of the room and passing around the wall of monitors in the office-like open-air chamber. Turning a corner, Sedna entered the space, stepping around where Purugly snoozed in the entrance and around to the chair. The half-lowered armature above Vesta's half-conscious, still blinded body fed a small mask to his face, a thin tube coming out of the mask and pinched between his lips, feeding him water. Sedna removed the mask delicately, caressing his cheek with her hand as the mask was fed up by a sprung coil to the armature, her hand pressing in on the base to activate the motor and gently lift itself back up above.

The small leap to the floor Mars did brought her back to her feet, having her walk around the chair as she approached Vesta and Sedna, detatching the Pokeball from her utility belt and stepping just past them to Purugly. She pointed the Pokeball's aperture wordlessly, aiming at Purugly's unconscious body and clicking the button. Before her eyes, Purugly evaporated into light and was absorbed into the Pokeball. She felt the weight return to the Pokeball as she down into the empty space where she had been, clipping the Pokeball back on her belt.

"I pulled the all-terrain around to the front of the shack entrance," said Sedna, taking heavy, laborious breaths as she recovered from a bout of sprinting. "Help me lift him."

Mars hurried to Vesta's side, seeing as Sedna had already attempted to lift his limp body by the other side. Beneath his backside, Mars found Sedna's arm and crossed over it, grasping the side of Vesta's neck. Though she was unable to see it, Mars could feel Vesta blindly groping along her shoulder and along the collar of her uniform, grasping identically where Mars was on her shoulder. She felt Sedna's hand prod along the side of her ribs and breast, finding a good hold beneath Vesta's side, and looking over slightly to Sedna for confirmation that she was ready. Wordlessly, she counted to three, hearing Vesta's breathing pound into her ear in hot swells, lifting him from the chair with both commanders on either side of him.

* * *

 _The sea moved for an endless expanse of horrid cold and frigid conditions, the wind piercing every part of my being as it moved through the churning waves. I held for dear life, but I didn't need to. It was then I realized that my wrists had been tied to poles on either side of me. This was a curious discovery, and I tried not to ponder too long on why they had not been something I had noticed earlier. That too with thinly carved branch clutched between my teeth, no longer and never passing by my cheek bones. I sat for hours, enduring the torture of adventure, sometimes and often times hanging forward with a limp stare, watching as my bare feet dangled over the angered ocean, my tattered pants torn away a section at a time in thick wafery strips._

* * *

Pausing after she had flipped the shirt over, Ariana reached for her coffee mug, keeping it poised at her lips as she stared forth over the table on the side of her opposite the ironing board. She set the cup down carefully, resuming her work. Her fingers held the thin white fabric of the tiny dress shirt pinched down with two fingers, the curved edge of the iron's head dragging over the sleeve's surface.

"I'm not upset..." said Ariana. "I'm just... I'm not upset..."

Archer had folded his hands down over his crossed legs, his thumbs softly rubbing over one another as he stared at Ariana, watching her pace around the ironing board as she carefully ironed out wrinkly imperfections in the shirt.

"I just want you to know that you have a considerable amount of influence over me..." Ariana spoke. "And that means that the way I perceive things often overlaps with how you perceive things, and even if I disagree with you... Just know that you have that power and you should take it with an ounce of responsibility, at least..."

As Ariana looked up, she hadn't noticed that Archer now stood in front of her, standing opposite the ironing board that had wedged itself between the two, the child-sized shirt draped over the board. He had appeared like a ghost, staring at Ariana's eyes even when she wasn't looking, carefully inspecting her every move with a stillness, calmly watching her without malice or fear.

Though Ariana had tried to ignore it, eyes avoiding Archers as her lips were poised on the point of protest, but she never did. Her red eyes flared up to meet Archer's cool, icy blue eyes, watching each other with an intensity. Even as Archer approached her, she stood still, only taking a step back in protest but knowing that the table was behind her. Her head tilted down, and her eyes shut, only feeling Archer's hands caress her arms softly and the warmth that came with it, generating in the space between their two combined bodies. A hand curled beneath her chin, tipping her head up towards his. Though she tried to look away for a moment, she eventually returned her gaze back up to his, sharing the moment with him.

"I know I've made very unsavory suggestions in the past... Make no mistake, those are things I regret, and I hope you believe me when I say that... I am very sorry for those things, Ariana... Even I prod or poke fun at those things, they still are haunting... The sins of what I've said haunt us both, and I'm very, truly sorry for those things..."

* * *

 _The ship crested a shallow part of the sea, a perpetual plain of high sand that the sea wafted over in a thin glaze. The thin layer carried on for miles, leading to a mountain in the center of the endless expanse of thin sea. The boat would slide through these thick, tall dunes as it would run out of water to float on, and instead stall softly before pressing on once again. After hours of the stop and stall, the ship finally ended it's journey, a feet of water splashing and licking the sides of the hull._

 _The rickety platform, the old wooden board I sat on fell forward, taking the metal polearms I had been tied to with it, before I crashed into the thin layer of water, submerged up to about a foot. As I lifted myself from the debris of my home of hours, I stood as much as I could, still tied to the polearms, squinting up at the hot sun._

 _A crashing wave rolled in the distance. This is what I believe to be the first instance of The Time Beast._

* * *

"What just is this 'Time Beast'?"

The light of the glass chute spread over the concrete floor dimly. The three commander caravan passed into the golden halo of light surrounding the chute, a haze of old dust from years gone construction surrounding them.

Sedna groaned, letting her side of Vesta slide down towards the floor of the lifting platform and letting him sit down gently, letting him rest against the plexiglass walls temporarily. She had slung a small bag of supplies over her shoulder, one she had carried down from her trip to the surface. She stood up for just a moment to ease the strap off of her shoulder, resting it on the floor by Vesta's legs. Undoing the strap off the fabric cover the bag, she slid out a long, slender white labcoat, unfolding it and letting it unfurl towards the platform floor. The labcoat sleeves slid with ease over her arms and allowed her to straighten the rest of the coat.

Mars' nose wrinkled. She too had squatted to the floor, helping ease Vesta down while Sedna put the thin, papery coat on, and staying with him. It was then, letting out an eased breath as she tried to acclimate to the situation, that she had noticed the stirring Vesta had not showered in a long time.

"You found the printed pages, hm?" asked Sedna, running a hand up over her tufty, short hair before kneeling down beside Vesta. In the sagging, open bag, Sedna grabbed a bottle filled with a murky, black liquid. Looking up in moderate realization, squinting as she looked skyward, she found the mounted platform control switch and toggled the switch.

Mars adjusted her stance, feeling the floor beneath her jolt softly and lift them skyward. "Yeah, I did," she said.

Tilting Vesta's head back, Sedna pressed the opening of the botttle to his lips and carefully lifted the bottle upward, slipping the murky black liquid down into his mouth. When he struggled, Sedna tightened her grip on his chin, holding him still for his own safety.

"Well, _Commander_ , how much do you know about Evolution?" asked Sedna. With her focus still on Vesta, her hand slid down from his chin down to cup his Adam's apple with her palm, feeling the surging warmth as the liquid passed to his stomach.

"Evolution? I mean, doesn't everyone know about that?"

"Evolution in the sense of Natural Selection. 'The' Evolution," said Sedna. As the last of the bottle's contents finished pouring into Vesta's mouth, she rubbed his forehead softly, getting a grunt of recognition from him. "Big picture Evolution, not the one they teach you in Trainer's school. Upper Division Evolution."

"I've studied it," said Mars, peering oddly at the empty, black-tainted bottle Sedna was placing in the bag beside her.

"Of course you have. It's another one of Cyrus' master-class obsessions, isn't it? The creation, origin of all things, stuff like that?"

* * *

 _Though I ran, sprinting as fast I humanly could, feeling the rumble of waves moving the whole of nature behind me and soon surrounding me, the wave crashed into me._

 _Strangely, it seems that in this instance The Time Beast wants me to find it now. It is literally and figuratively pushing me towards it. That is how I first discovered that the island is where this iteration of The Time Beast resides. That is how I first discovered its hunger._

* * *

Grasping Archer's hand, brushing away from her chin softly, Ariana slid a hand alongside his neck, rubbing it gently. Her breath turned hot and weighty, her eyes trailing over his features and taking all of it in.

"If I could catch Celebi in a bottle..." breathed Ariana.

* * *

 _Its hunger to destroy all that we have, burning by the intensity that is his rage, the rage that drives him to do these things, take things from us that we once already had. The only true thief that could trump time itself._

* * *

"The Time Beast is something awful, savage. Something Arceus never intended for us to endure."

"Legendary Pokemon cannot evolve, neither in the traditional sense or the Natural Selection kind. They just always have been. They are seemingly fixed."

"But what came before is now extinct. The Time Beast is extinct, but time isn't. It is extinct in the physical form, and it can travel to our future to wreck it for everyone. It is enraged by its fate and its inescapability. There is nothing it can do to escape its fate, but it knows that we are mortal and be taken away from our fate. The Time Beast can take us from our fate."

"So... This is what you've been doing? This is what the whole Johto precinct has been up to since then? Does Cyrus even know—Was this even approved? How...?"

"Cyrus' mission was simple: predict the future. Mars, we are oracles. We are the oracles that were made to find the future and ensure that all of Team Galactic's plans, Cyrus' will, would come to order and success at some point, that a new universe would be created. Why did you think Cyrus would have any business out in Johto? What is the secret to the Johto reason? The best kept secret the Johtoan people have? It's time travel! It's the legends of Celebi that birthed the arts! We were instituted to watch the future from afar and tell Cyrus when to make a decisive move that would bring all of Team Galactic closer to the goal. We can alter the future to meet our needs when and however we like, just by simple observation."

"That's... That's insane."

"It is! That's why it's so fantastic, so magical. That's why The Time Beast is here and in our lives—to _abuse_ it."

"The Time Beast... You make it sound like he is time itself."

"The Time Beast can traverse it just as easily as Celebi can. That is why we pursue The Time Beast. That is Celebi's mandate."

* * *

 _On the shores of this new island, an island of discovery, I crawled from the soaked sands where I had crashed down and so too had the wave. My ambassadors, the wave of sea and the distant ship had all but left me. The ship I had seen, the old mast swaying in winds that carried me to this very place (by the same providence as the wave, by now I had realized) too had crashed among the rocks, and I was the greater survivor from then on. I could crawl away, and my humble vessel could not._

 _The water ahead, the surrounding ocean seemed thin, miles of high sand and shore stretching ahead. The sand had not distributed as it had so evenly with any sea or island. The forces of nature had not taken its course. Even the peak of the high island seemed less worn than anything else I had ever seen in nature. Seemingly, this island was fresh, was new. The seas had not risen to shape the island and thus the rest of the world. Did indeed this be the beginning of time? Never had I seen an island of this shape, and it seemed peculiar when I had, after an experience as one not myself in times previous, been able to identify the island in present times. Perhaps the seas had yet to rise and knock down the tall column of stone that had crafted this island. Was the ship I had taken out of this time? Or was it a product of the time I was now a visitor in, simply taken to an island that had been crafted now just recently? Was I now in an isolated singularity?_

 _I knew that these questions would soon be questions answered, and so I set forth, walking through the sparse brush up ahead. Though the sound of sea and crashing waves were nonexistent, those too seemed empty the rest of the land, devoid of sound from even the most primordial Pokemon._

* * *

"Celebi... He... _She_... It gave you a message? A mission?" asked Mars.

With a boot wedged in the metal frame of the All-Terrain Vehicle, stomping down on the rubber seal, Sedna kept herself up halfway on the deck of the vehicle, leaning close to adjust the seat-belts restraining Vesta in his seat. She gritted her teeth, tugging the belt tight as it kept him upright. After taking a moment to make sure he was comfortable, she gazed up at him, watching his head roll against the padded headrest.

Levying herself down to the ground, feeling the ATV bounce lightly on its suspension, Sedna closed the door carefully, walking past Mars who had been waiting just behind the door.

"We had tried being fair to Celebi. We didn't want to upset it, but the unfortunate reality is that we really needed to use it for the supernatural abilities it had. It wasn't like there was a device we could make to travel time," said Sedna. "So, when asked what it wanted in return, Celebi explained to us what was deeply troubling it. Celebi knew about The Time Beast and what it was doing to present times, ones beyond the date of its extinction, but it knew there was little it could do. It also knew that, in all the visions of time that we traveled to, there was nothing we could do to keep it out of our visions. Celebi asked that we research it. There was the possibility of capture that hung over our heads, that we may one day capture it and end future ruin that it may have or will cause, but we know what a daunting task that might be."

* * *

 _I had crawled for hour upon dreaded hour, scaling a near-vertical face as I approached a brush clearing, reaching that first path._

* * *

"And you knew Cyrus wouldn't go for it?"

"I knew we didn't have a choice, from Celebi," said Sedna. "If we wanted to observe the future as Cyrus intended then we had to follow through with Celebi's request. Giving Cyrus a say, unfortunately, would complicate it."

* * *

 _The path seemed to move along the mountain; it had been carved into it. The path was too fresh to have been constructed by any other conceivable being that we've encountered so far. This was new, a creation untouched by any other man that had traversed this island._

* * *

"I'd make her repeat the moments we had together... Unedited... Not a single change..."

Archer and Ariana, moving close and intimately, kissed one another's lips in tight embrace.

* * *

"There's a lot, all that's gone on without you here to watch it, all that requires explanation," said Sedna. "I'm very sorry that I don't have the time to show it all to you, but hopefully it'll start to make sense."

As the ATV bobbed jerkily on its suspension, moving alongside a hill as they went down towards a ravine, moving along the outside of a forest through a clearing, Mars stared dead ahead and absorbed Sedna's words more than the scenery. Her body jerked side-to-side in the seat, knocked around involuntarily by the rough terrain they traversed. All the while, she listened to the slow groaning sounds coming from the backseat, where Vesta stirred and came to.


	4. Chapter 3

_"A long stretch must be mended, but only through the most extreme and miraculous ways can this be achieved."_

— _Ghastra, Bay Province of the Draconid Order, Third Age (Translation: John Stone)_

Water droplets dripped off of Archer's face, a sheen of moisture covering him. He gripped the sink to steady himself, holding himself close to the mirror as he stared his grim reflection down, a callous, exhausted reflection. Beneath him, the sink continued to run with a gentle hiss, moments before the iron push-handle sprung up and sealed itself, ending the stream of water. Outside, the echoing sounds of travel reached his ears, people racing through crowded tunnels to get to their destination.

Beside him, atop a paper towel dispenser, a thickly knit black ski cap rested atop it. As Archer contemplated the hat he ran a hand over his short, prickly blue hair, his hand grazing down below his ears where the hair had been cut incredibly close. Down by his boot, he nudged a black tote container slightly, getting it to jostle on its handcart.

With one last look to his short-cropped hair, Archer grabbed the hat and stretched it wide, slipping it over his head and pulling it down so that it covered his hair.

* * *

At the top of a hillside crest, Sedna parked the ATV. She opened the door with a loud chunking sound, stepping out and sinking her boots into the cool grass. Behind her trailed her white labcoat, caught by the chilled breeze as she walked to the end of the vehicle.

Though Mars too had gotten out, she was staring down at the bottom of the hill, a valley leading to the backside of a forest. When she squinted through her red bangs that knocked around in the wind and blinded her, she could see that the valley led up to the backside of the shack she had initially came to when finding Sedna and Vesta. Though the shack was several hundred feet away from where the valley sloped down, Mars squinted in seeming confusion. In the air, her finger traced down from the shack, down over land it sat on in an invisible line that passed deep underground like the tunnel she had traveled in, and then ran her finger in a horizontal line along where the main chamber should be, seeing that it led up to the sloping valley, and eventually the wreckage at the foot of the valley. Mars lowered her hand slowly and unknowingly, mentally lost in the wreckage that she hadn't noticed before.

At the foot of the valley, a building that had seemingly been built into the curve of the hill looked to have collapsed, the smashed in walls having tumbled in and crumbled into a pile of rubble. All around where grass would've covered the landscape seemed like burnt earth, old worn rock and dead plant life. The old concrete and steel that had collapsed looked as though it had once belonged to a warehouse with a high amount of fortifications, or an old base that had been destroyed.

The gentle squealing of wheels behind Mars caught her attention, and she turned to see Sedna with a gurney with a tall, expanded suspension, tiny wheels beneath. As Sedna popped the handbrake on the gurney and locked it in place, Mars stepped back, walking backwards until she stood alongside Sedna and continued to gaze down beside her at the distant wreckage.

"We'll have to proceed on foot," said Sedna.

* * *

 _My dearest Archer_

 _We never made it to the Indigo Plateau. We had lost half our men along the way, and sooner or later I realized that Proton was right: there would be no end to the climb._

 _Once we had turned back, we were met with a nearly full-scale armada at the entrance to Victory Road. It was his idea to take us on the backs of what remaining flyable Pokemon we had. I owe a great deal to Proton for his decision to take the executives and higher-ranking officers rather than the grunts. That is the reason I can write to you today._

 _I need you most in this moment, more than any I have experienced in recent years. I still do not know why you reply._

* * *

The black knit cap hugged close to Archer's head, not letting a blue hair out from beneath it. His wet ears turned a deep rose color as the cool breeze of the underground terminal chilled them. Hands in his pocket, standing close to a pole with close guard over his luggage beside him, he watched the people around him with intense interest, occasionally giving a glance towards the guard at the staircase across the large expanse of crowd.

The train across the way from him caught him off-guard, as Archer would stare into the dark, murky glass that projected his reflection. He gazed at where he had touched up his eyebrows with a bit of makeup to make them appear thick and brown, but unassuming. He was tempted to run a finger over the fake, prosthetic mole he had attached to his chin moments earlier, but thought better of it. Even in the deep black sweater he wore beneath his uniform always and the white pants, it was the beige jacket that made him look fairly unassuming to those who were looking for him.

* * *

Sableeye lunged ahead, leaping to and crawling along the tops of large rocks that lined either side of the valley as they approached the less natural side of the valley. He climbed up with limber, incredibly thin limbs as he scaled the topmost rock in the layer of the valley the were walking, expressionless geodesic eyes panning over the rocky spaces before and ahead of him. Poised on his hind legs, Sableeye leaned back and squatted, dusting his claws off of his knees and watching silently.

As the hollow metal supports of the gurney rattled and whined as they traveled over the dirt path, wheels spinning on their round mounts, Sedna grunted and pushed forward wordlessly, moving the heavy cart down into a space between boulders, one of which Sableeye stood atop. With great thrusts, Sedna launched the gurney over small hops needed to get to the next divet where the wheel would get stuck again, then gave another thrust.

Behind her, several feet back, Mars' boots crunched on the pebble-filled soil, her posture slanted back slightly as she walked, her toes pointing down with her arms outstretched beside her for balance as she moved down the steep hillside. The white plastic of her boots had become deeply covered with tan dirt, scuffed from knocking them when she circumnavigated boulders and muddied from long grass expanses. She had garnered cuts on her palms, developed sore fingers and the beginnings of callices, as well as chipped at the already finely-cut fingernails she had. Up towards the horizon, where Sedna had gained the lead with her heavy payload, she gazed at the two of them, where Sableeye's tiny purple body could easily be identified from where she was. As she hopped down over the last expanse of sloping hill, hopping over where it dropped sharply into the rock deposit, she took a few quick steps across, catching up with Sedna quickly, all the while winding herself.

Sedna had stopped up ahead. She watched as Sableeye launched himself down from the tall boulder, landing on the smaller one opposite the trail and racing down to the other side, a shrill howl coming from Sableeye as he launched himself at a screaming Ekans. Sedna quickly stepped around as carefully as she could, standing in front of the gurney as she waited for the ensuing battle to end.

As Mars approached from behind, cheeks flush with a panting exhaustion, she stepped around towards Sedna, caught between the gurney and the shorter boulder. Leaning back, she leaned against the wall, catching her breath as she stared down at her scraped boots.

"Not a single question about where we're going. I have to hand it to you Commander, you're a compliant one," said Sedna.

Mars looked up, meeting with Sedna's playful, teasing smile. She raised an eyebrow at the jabbing question, returning her gaze to the ground as she shuffled on her boots.

"I guess now wouldn't be a bad time to ask, would it?" said Mars.

"As good a time as ever."

* * *

 _My dearest Archer_

 _I still think to when we left those grunts at the base of Mt. Silver, where they scrambled to get around the entrance to Victory Road and there was no way around. Seemingly, they were all captured. I expect there wasn't much of a fight, and maybe only minor injuries. Still, it was them who put up the fight, were overwhelmed and struggled at the hands of the authorities, and not I._

 _They had cursed us very loudly when we took off. They were howling at us, screaming, but not begging. They knew we weren't coming back for them. They never asked, they just knew. It was as if they knew that this conclusion would be coming very soon to them._

 _It brings myself to the conclusion that I have raised that which I cannot take care of._

 _There are so many conclusions that Proton has brought up for how this might end. He has asked that I not return to the Radio Tower in Goldenrod, and that you should avoid it as well. I hope that this has reached you in time._

* * *

As the train bounced, racing along its steel track as it ran through dark tunnels, Archer held fast to the steel support pole, watching as his handcart bobbed softly, watching the thin black strap holding the tote to it warp with little effort.

Near silently, the thin silver watch on Archer's wrist beeped. When he looked at it, silencing the alarm on the digital device, he saw the time '10:45 AM' on it.

"Fifteen minutes to Goldenrod City," announced the crackling loudspeaker up above.

Squatting down, Archer undid the thin black strap holding the tote to the handcart. He then opened the lid, peering inside of the storage unit. A thin white jacket lay atop it, bearig the black shield and red 'R' emblazoned atop it: Team Rocket.

* * *

"Down, Sableeye. Get to the front of us, you hear?"

Sableeye hissed in compliance, scaling the boulder he had perched himself atop, crawling vertically with delicate precision on limber limbs, pulling himself down vertical on the surface with his head facing down towards the ground. He then let go, sailing towards the ground with thin outstretched forearms, moments before catching himself and then scampering up ahead to reach Sedna, running ahead of them.

Mars approached from close behind, entering the clearing. Keeping close to Sedna, watching as Sableeye scampered ahead of her and going in front of both her and Sedna several feet ahead, she paused, waiting for Sedna's next move. Turning to observe her, she saw that she was staring at the structure ahead. When she looked, she saw exactly what Sedna was seeing, eyes widening in shock.

On one of the remaining, still standing concrete walls had a host of graffiti atop it, the most prominent being a bright red mess of words: 'Here lies dead Rockets'

* * *

 _My dearest Archer_

 _Silver asked once again who his father was. I did not tell him, as usual, but this time he said something completely different. He said that it wouldn't work with him for very long, and that he had to know. He was becoming a man soon. I told him that he was only fifteen, more reminded him, and that it would be longer than he expected, and by then it wouldn't matter._

 _Maybe with this next one I will tell them, whoever he or she turns out to be. The doctor says I have three months left. He estimates that when I last saw you, I was only two months. He still refuses to take my blood for a paternity test. He says it is too weak, too thin, but I know he is lying._

* * *

All of the passengers in Archer's train car had cleared to the very corners, a radius of empty floor space formed around where Archer stood. They stared at him fearfully, staring at the Rocket patch over the breast of his jacket, trying to stay away as far as they could.

With a warm, wet rag in his hands, Archer had finished wiping away the makeup that colored his eyebrows their color. With them fully at their original thin blue color, he set aside the rag in the same pile where the thick brown jacket and his ski cap had been resting atop the black tote and handcart. He tucked his arms behind his back, pacing the empty space as he waited.

A Rocket grunt jabbed his elbows at people, knocking people over slightly so that they stepped aside as he made his way through the crowds. As people got the idea and cleared a path for him to the open space where Archer stood, he entered quickly, grabbing a pole for support as he stood with Archer. He carried with him a black backpack, clutched in a knot in his fist as he threw the open bag to the ground, stolen Pokeballs spilling out and wobbling on the moving floor. The barrel of a pistol slid out, one of two inside that had been taken from security guards.

"This entire train has been disarmed, sir. No signs of resistance," the grunt reported, standing at attention for Archer.

Archer nodded sagely, turning his attention to those surrounding him, giving them careful glances. "Good. And what of progress in Goldenrod?" he asked.

"The jammer has been installed. No outside communications are reaching the passengers. As for our own transmissions there have been none."

Archer's eyes raced over the floor, considering possibilities in silence. Finally, he looked up at a chair across from him, eyeing a Pokeball that had slipped up against the wall. "Perhaps they've run into a snag, earlier transmissions being decoded earlier than we expected," he said.

"Of course, sir. Regulations state that a blackout must—"

Several more people behind Archer let out cries of distress, shouts of protest and thrusting coming as another Rocket grunt made his way to the train car through the crowds. He kicked and shoved much more forcefully than the last grunt, clearing a wide path for a man that followed him, one he grasped by the arm and dragged him through. When they had cleared, the Rocket grunt stepped into the clearing, letting the man with him walk ahead several feet before he shoved him to the ground, letting him fall to his hands and knees.

"This is the captain who would not surrender. We've replaced him with Grunt J at the controls."

Groaning, the man on the floor raised himself on his hands. He was a heavier man, thick and formidable posture with old age making him weathered and weak. His captain's hat fell forward, exposing his balding head. His blue vest draped over him, the badge with his name and title sagging on its magnetic clasp. Stiffly, he raised his head up to Archer, wincing and pushing his round glasses up to the bridge of his nose.

"So... You're the coward whose taking over my train," said the captain, wincing as his bruised limbs brought him to rest on his knees. "You've got a lot to answer for... This will not stand when we get to the station. They will have you arrested, jailed—"

"I'm expecting the authorities when we get to Goldenrod," said Archer, "but I'm not expecting them to be in control when we reach the station. I'm expecting a... Leadership shift."

The captain, resolve ever tightening, grit his teeth, his face turning red with anger. "You're criminals, and you will suffer your consequences, boy!"

Archer frowned. "'Boy', you say?"

Looking up to the grunt who had brought the captain in, Archer gave a wave of his hand, stepping closer to the captain as he did so. He watched as the grunt quickly launched himself at the crowd, raising the dagger tucked in his belt and herding them out of the corner they had gathered in, then turning his gaze to the captain.

"You don't run things around here... You aren't in charge!" shouted the captain, craning his head around as the grunt cleared the space.

"You are gravely mistaken," said Archer. He then kicked his leg up into the captain, ramming the side of his boot into the apex of his chest and knocking him back over his knees and to the side. Archer immediately followed up with a swift kick to his stomach, forcing a loud grunt out of the captain. As he let the captain writhe, catching his pained, labored breaths, he reached to the side and reached for the gray Ultra Ball mounted on the hip of his belt. He looked to the grunt keeping guard at the doorway, nodding to him as the grunt reached for his own Pokeball and tossed it to him, Archer catching it, now with both Pokeballs in hand.

As he looked down to the captain, spitting up blood from his fat, chapped lips. Making eye contact with him, Archer grinned.

"I want an apology," said Archer. He reached down, grabbing the man by the collar and lifting him by it so that he sat upright, leaning him against one of the poles. As he kneeled, squatting close to the captain, Archer bared his teeth in anger. "I want you to say you're sorry, right now."

The captain spit in Archer's face.

Rather than flinch or even wipe away the bloodied saliva that coated Archer's chin, Archer stared at the captain. He then grabbed both of the captain's wrists, moving them when they struggled slightly to the top of the pole he leaned against. In an instant, the second grunt who wasn't keeping guard came alongside Archer, producing handcuffs and latching them onto both the captain's wrists and the pole.

"Sir, three minutes to arrival," said the grunt.

"Good," said Archer, satisfied with the bindings of the captain. He stood up, walking away from the captain, still with the Pokeballs in both hands. "We'll make this short."

Archer clicked both releases on the Pokeball, pointing them at the floor in front of the captain. Twin red images of Houndoom appeared on the ground.

* * *

An old haze filled the collapsed structure, pouring down through the large tears in the ceiling. Both Mars and Sedna had passed deep into the inner chamber of the abandoned hideout, a yawning chasm of darkness ahead where the structure opened up into the lower base of the hill. Rubble and fallen, crumbled sections of wall filled the landscape, vaulting down towards the inside of the hill. Many of the interior walls still held in some form or fashion, alluding to what was once there.

Mars lifted herself up over a large pile of rubble, bracing her knees as she levied herself up atop it and pushed up, scaling the pile. As she caught her breath, taking a moment just to stand and ease her footing into the sifting piles of debris, she raised her head through her frayed bangs, gazing up at the tall section of concrete wall that rested with an ominous tilt to the side. Seeing deep cracks, carvings into the wall, Mars stepped close, digging her fingers into the cracks and lifting her leg around one of the taller sections, hoisting herself up and climbing around the tall section.

As she swung her leg over the side, her boot making contact with the ground while her other boot pushed her off the section of wall, Mars' hand pulled free of the crack she had sunk her fingers into. She let out a loud gasp of pain, grabbing her hand as she steadied her footing. Though her head flashed with pain, she steadied her footing and stared down at her hand, looking at the long gash across her palm. Blood leaked down over her hand, pouring from the gash over onto her wrists, an incredibly bright red.

The blood dripped from her hand. Looking down, Mars saw a round, red splatter had collected on the toe of her boot, leaking over the curve and catching in the hammered edges. Though a part of her felt the urge to clean it off, she lifted her boot slightly as she held her hand in her other hand. She looked down, realizing she had stepped on a large section of black cloth. As she stepped back, gazing at the black cloth and where it sank beneath a pile of of debris, Mars could see an edge where a piece of bright red cloth had been stitched on. In her curiosity, more had dripped from her hand, onto the flag.

Mars then stared up, looking at one of the last remaining sections of wall before the rest of the abandoned hideout vaulted down into darkness deep beneath the hill. From the section of wall, the suspending metal beam sagging partially, a ragged black flag hung, swaying in its tattered, dirty glory, a red 'R' emblazoned on the front.

* * *

Archer stood in the front traincar, standing still with his arms crossed behind his back in the center of the gently undulating floor, feeling the car bounce as it raced towards its destination. In the distance, over the near-silent whimpers and cries of distress from the captive passengers that surrounded him, howling shouts of pain reached him. His eyes shut as he smiled, the shouts for mercy oddly pleasing him, even as disturbing and gruesome as they were.

As the screams died down, the crowd parted once again, individuals shoved aside in brief displays of force as the two grunts entered. After standing at attention once again, saluting Archer as he turned his attention to him.

"We will leave the captain, not a thing changed. There will be no resistance on this train or in the station today," said Archer.

"Yes sir."

"Yes sir."

"Good," said Archer. "Then the next order of business will be getting in touch with Petrel to see how things in Goldernrod are going. F, you will take a scanning kit to the front to attempt to reestablish communications with their teams."

Grunt F saluted again, then removed his hat and bowed, kneeling towards Archer. As he got to his feet, he gazed up at Archer, placing the hat back on his head carefully. "Yes sir, it will be done."

Archer raised his finger towards Grunt F. "Use only emergency frequencies, no public channels, as our ciphers may have been discovered. Not a single mistake."

"Yes sir."

As Grunt F quickly made his way to the rear of the train, slipping into the crowds of people taking up the entry ways, both Archer and the remaining grunt stood alone, waiting for the grunt to slip beyond Archer's sight. Archer then folded his arms once again behind his back, hand clasping wrist as he paced along the floor of the train car.

Moments after Archer's orders, the grunt still remained at attention in the car with him. After careful consideration, he broke formation, stepping up to Archer, producing from his own utility belt a Pokeball. When he stepped close to Archer, noticed by him, the grunt handed him the Pokeball in his hand, Archer's Pokeball with Houndoom returned inside, holding it in front of him. When Archer took it, the grunt took several steps back from Archer, his hands at his side.

"Do you think there's a reason why Petrel hasn't reached out to us?"

Looking to the grunt with an empty stare, Archer thought momentarily, beginning to pace again. Though the grunt had just spoken out of turn, Archer didn't seem fazed by it.

"Whether or not our plan has gone accordingly can't be determined by a simple misstep or minor hiccup. I will take all precautions to ensure that the plan still picks up where Petrel left off. For right now, all I need you to do right now is make sure that it isn't mass pandemonium when we get to the station," said Archer, "and that means making sure no one gets off this train."

* * *

 _My dearest Archer_

 _I'm not in love with Proton. I thought you should know that. Please write back._

* * *

As Sedna crested a particularly high rising mound of debris, she looked back over her shoulder. Squinting, it seemed as though the landscape of the crumbling hideout was devoid of people. Even Sableeye hadn't ran ahead or lagged behind, seemingly clinging close to her after she had barked at him for so long to stay. Beside her, Vesta rested on his gurney, still half-conscious and turning in his restraints softly, but those were all that she knew and could see were still with her. Mars was seemingly lost.

The brakes on the gurney squealed to a perfect lock, left to sit a flat space of the ground. Sedna, drawing the sleeves back over her arms, watching carefully as the flowing end of her labcoat drifted over rocks that could easily tear and destroy it, she leveled herself down over the shifting, crumbling slopes that eased around the mound she had rested Vesta on. She brought her center of gravity low, sidling her feet along the narrowing path as her hand steadied herself beside her. Once she had carefully moved herself down, hopping over the sloping end to the path, Sedna found herself standing on a wall. One foot planted on the jagged top edge of the remains of a wall that still stood, another on the rubble that had slid in and been braced back by the wall. As Sedna got her balance, she saw that there was some blood on the ground beside a wall perpendicular to hers. Beside it, a long black piece of cloth draped down over the side of the wall, a few bloodied hand prints on the wall beside it, leading down into the deep space below.

Leaning over the wall, Sedna looked down below. The room that the collapsed walls had once enclosed was an office, complete with a desk and several half-destroyed pieces of furniture. Atop the dirt-covered desk, Mars sat with her legs folded, a stack of papers beside her, one unfolded on her lap.

In near-silence, Sedna walked along the perimeter of the wall, watching both her own footsteps and where Mars sat on the desk. When she reached the lengthy black cloth, realizing it was one of the half-buried flags that had once hung on the walls of the building, Sedna squatted down and gripped the edge of the wall, kicking her legs over the edge and levying herself down as she grasped the edge of the wall. With one hand holding her to the wall, her legs hanging down freely from the wall with her boot toes pressed to the surface of the wall for meager support, Sedna used her other hand to grab the flag, using it to levy herself down into the former office, now turned pit.

As her boots crunched on the gravelly floor, littered with chunks of concrete, trash and steel beams, Sedna passed an overturned metal filing cabinet, one that had miraculously surfaced. Its metal drawers had been torn from it, left aside with a bloodied hand-print on the handle.

"How much do you know about Team Rocket?" asked Mars, voice as seemingly lost in thought as her expression gave away.

"Quite a bit, I suppose. More than your average joe for that matter," said Sedna. Her voice seemed to trail off as she walked around the desk, glancing up at Mars every so often. "Why do you ask?"

"Did you know my mother was an Executive?"

This gave Sedna some pause. It made her stop in her tracks, hands resting by her hips as her boots shuffled on the ground, kicking aside rocks idly.

"No, I didn't," said Sedna.

Mars flipped a page over, reshuffling the old tattered documents in her lap. She had drawn her wooly black sleeves high over her bleeding palm to stifle the blood. As rudimentary as it was, it still stopped the blood from reaching the documents, leaving the pages untarnished.

"One of the things I'm slowly learning about my mother is that she's an incredibly poor planner. Like, she doesn't plan _at all,_ " said Mars. "She doesn't have any foresight, any sense of what the future might be... Any idea of what consequences might mean, and the broader subject."

Careful with her words, Sedna raised her voice. "Are you just learning that now?"

"No, I probably should've figured it out early, when she had two kids and then went to prison," said Mars. "But I get the feeling that these journal entries were never meant to be read... By anyone. They're so... _Raw_. It's unsettling, it's like she's here with me."

A desk chair rested beneath a thick drift of debris, the still gleaming brass feet of the chair sticking up. Gripping the old base, Sedna pulled, tugging powerfully as she pulled the chair from the rubble, sending crumbling chunks of concrete out over the seat as it slid out. A cloud of white dust kicked up all around the chair and Sedna's legs as she righted the chair onto its feet, setting it down on a slight slope of ground close to the desk. The old, mothridden leather of the chair wheezed as she sat down in it, old dirt and dust kicking up around her.

The page in Mars' hand, lifted unsteadily up and held in front of her eyes, fluttered in the near-nonexistent wind. She trembled silently, going over the final words on the page.

* * *

The dark of the tunnel made the flickering lights of the train seem that much more unsettling. A hush had fallen over the crowded train cars as the yellow stripe painted along the wall, the painted marquee for Goldenrod City in clear white font, went racing by.

Archer stared ahead, gazing into his glossy black reflection on the window, biding his time. There were only minutes left.

Looking up at the operations room, the captain's seat at the head of the train, the door was slightly ajar. Grunt F stood in the doorway, fingers efficiently moving a dial as he moved the frequencies of his device. With headphones on that had attached to the device placed on the workbench in the operations room, he looked up to Archer and shook his head, passing through the various frequencies one last time.

* * *

 _My dearest Archer_

 _Proton no longer accepts my calls. I've tried for months, as well as sent my newest, most updated phone number, stating that it hasn't changed in a letter. After the last time when I moved and changed my number, I know it was blocked. I know he has turned paranoid in recent years, and I had to convince him many times to prove to him I wasn't arrested and wasn't providing evidence._

 _Then, when I was reading the papers in the morning, I found that he had been arrested. I was smart, Archer, and I didn't provide my return address when I wrote to him. You certainly would've called me crazy, but it was the right thing to do. I worry about Silver quite a bit, but not as much as I worry about Mars. Both of them are so young, so hard on one another, and more than I have before have I worried what would happen to them should I become incapable. I would want you to be the saving grace should something happen to me. When I see Mars, I feel what is seemingly the last piece of you, because I'm so desperate for you to meet her. It is incredibly important to me._

* * *

Mars grit her teeth in pain, before letting out a loud yelp. Shutting her eyes in blinded pain, she hung her head low into her chest.

With a leatherman in hand, Sedna cut off another thin strip of white fabric from her labcoat. After prying the last of the loose white strands that held the newly cut strip to the remains of her sleeve, Sedna yanked the strip loose with a grunt, releasing the grip her teeth had on the shoulder of the labcoat and letting the wafty white fabric fall to her leatherman fell with a metallic clatter onto the rubble below. The chair wheezed as Sedna pulled herself closer to Mars and pulled the thin strip of fabric taught between her hands, wrapping it tightly around the palm of Mars' hand and crossing it over another thin, identically cut strip. A red splotch of absorbed blood marked the center of the palm, a thick white wrap cut in a thicker band of cloth from the same sleeve, wrapped tightly around the center with blood soaking it. The center turned darker as the crossed strips tightened, absorbing blood at the center.

Mars let out an involuntarily wail of pain. Her face paled, fingers curling in vain as she fought the burning sensation in her gash. She stilled herself as the pain died down, mentally shutting out any future visions of pain in anticipation of a second wave.

"Keep pressure. If those wraps get loose we'll have a serious problem," said Sedna.

"Duly noted," groaned Mars, sliding herself off the desk and onto her palm as a slight break to slow her momentum off the desk was a poor choice, as it shot agony up through her arm. It made her want to hurl, but she kept close, steadying herself as she walked forward.

Sedna watched with careful interest. As she slid the labcoat back onto her arms, careful to move her hand through the tattered sleeve with little interference, she stood up, following Mars. She watched her unsteady movements, watching her walk around the former office. With a passing glance, she eyed the formerly busy desk, one covered in old tattered papers for journals and different notes. They were gone, taken, leaving the destroyed surface of the desk where it was.

"Do you have a clean conscious raiding this office? Feel alright with this?" asked Sedna, a sense of taunting masked by a playfulness to her voice. She had taken to staring skyward, at the grayish sky through the large gashes in the ceiling.

Mars found herself standing by a destroyed painting, one that had fallen a long time ago. The glass surface of the painting had collapsed in on itself, shards scattered about, ground to a fine white powder at some edges. The painting itself had mildewed on one side, an awful smell where the glossy photo paper had taken on water and shriveled up on one side, turning to a brown pulp. The remaining side, trapped beneath dirt and rock, showed a black background. As Mars kicked aside some debris from the surface, she unveiled the true image of the painting's remains, a muted arrangement of pastel flowers on a dark surface.

"Are you upset that I took your charter from you?" asked Mars.

Continuing to admire the sky, Sedna let the silence drag out, knowing her answer but not saying anything. "I don't know. I suppose," she finally replied.

The pile of crumbled wreckage Mars had kicked aside with her boot slowly tumbled back towards the painting, shrouding it again. Her hair fluttered softly, bangs starting to brush down into her brow. She squinted, looking off to the side.

"Are you going to do anything to me?" asked Mars, following another long silence.

"No, but I expect you to come willingly to my demonstration. We still have Vesta to worry about, and for that I'll be needing a special companion. You need to meet my special companion," said Sedna. "It's not a punishment, but it's necessary."

Mars was silent. Beneath her arm, she clutched the stack of journals tightly. Over her shoulder, she turned to look up at Sedna.

When Mars didn't reply, Sedna took in a deep snort of air, kicking her boots as she walked, pacing. "I'm not upset that Team Galactic is revoking it's own name from me. To tell you the truth, it's fine. I haven't felt like I'm apart of Team Galactic for ages anyway. This mission is somewhat transcendent of that, I suppose. It's taken on a life of it's own... _My_ life. I'm going to continue the mission without you, without Team Galactic, and I want that to be okay. I won't use the Galactic name or expect any supplies. Just let me continue. Let Vesta and I continue, and we'll make our end of our bargain with Celebi right. We just need time, much more time, and that's going to be a complete devotion."

As Mars heard Sedna out, she paused. Folding her arms, she walked towards the center, approaching Sedna peacefully. Her head hung low, watching the passing ground as she thought.

"I just need your approval," finished Sedna.

* * *

A rush of air built from the beginning of the train, a loud echoing coming from the first car and passing down to where Archer stood. A bright surge of light passed along all the windows the opening began to face the train, the squealing sound of brakes filling the ears of all the passengers. The lit inside of the terminal came to face them as they entered and the train slowed.

The tiled interior was empty, devoid of people and silent. Though the lights were on, all the displays inside were off. Several neon signs for different nearby facilities, nearby Pokemon Centers and shopping had been powered off, as well as backlit advertisements for different attractions in Goldenrod City and nearby towns, plastic signs for restrooms and all of the emergency exit light coming from the stairs up to the main building overhead were seemingly powered off and dark.

On the tiled floor were signs of a struggle. Deep chunks of the floor had been mashed in, cracked and scattered, large claw marks dragged through the floor as well as other violent impacts. Deep char marks covered several sections in different blast radiuses, some covering the far sides of support columns, black scarring over the side of a wall. Several small black streaks from minor blasts, some scattered and overlapping. Chunks of burnt rubble seemed to cover large sections of the area from no identifiable place.

Most of the passengers jumped when the doors sprung open. An eerie gust of wind entered the train cabin, the air-conditioned air tasting artificial and dead, filled with silence.

Several of the passengers turned and watched as Rocket grunts distributed themselves amongst carts. One looked for a command from Archer, who despite his confusion didn't visibly show it. The grunt closest to him had his Pokeball held tightly in front of him, ready to launch it, but still waiting for a command.

Kneeling down, Archer lifted the white leg of his pants up to the brim of his boot, a black holster strapped tightly to his legs. Silently, as he watched the opening of the train car ahead of him, Archer removed the leather strap from his holster. Inside, a fresh and unused pistol, the boxy handle sliding comfortably into his grip. The weighty gun slid out silently as Archer stood back up after securing the strap. Looking to the grunts beside him, he saw that they had both done similarly by grabbing for their guns. Archer slid his thumb over the rear of the pistol's slim form factor and cocked it with a low click of metal.

* * *

 **End of Act I**


	5. Chapter 4 (Act II)

**Act II**

 _"This is the sound they play down in Hoenn every night: the symphony of war."_

 _-Charles Jameson, Broadcaster for 'The Goldenrod Radio News Hour'_

The train met the concrete lip of the terminal platform seamlessly. Archer had stared at it for moments in hesitation, concerned that it may be a trap. Instead, he stepped over the lip, into the open space of the terminal, just below the ledge of the train entrance.

As the grunts all stepped together over into the train terminal, Archer held a hand out to them, gun poised, his gaze turned overhead to the metal barrier overhead—a ledge with a visible blind spot. The ceiling lower where they stood, but the rest of the terminal had a high ceiling.

As Archer turned to look at the grunts down the line, each one coming from a single train car, the one furthest down hugged his gun close, stepping to the far edge of the terminal. He hopped out quickly from beneath the ledge, looking up to the ledge overhead pensively with his gun aimed in both hands, both arms outstretched and pointed up at the empty ledge above. Instead of shouting in panic or giving the all-clear, he stared up in confusion, slowly lowering his weapon. All of his compatriots stared at him, expressionless and unsure of what to make of his expression. All at once, they stepped over the edge, entering the train terminal.

Archer was stopped. A tall, black flag fell down from the ledge as he stepped forward, covering his path to the terminal. All of the grunts leaped at once, pointing their guns at the black flag and aiming at Archer, until they all realized it was just a flag.

A giant hole had been cut through the center of the flag. Archer, tentative to the flag, ran his hand along the inside of the hole, feeling the cut fabric material of it. As his eyes scanned the outside of the flag, his eyes narrowed in on the corners. In the dark of the ledge, Archer could only barely make out the details of the flag. He then took the flag, tearing it down and leaving it to flutter towards the floor, sagging gently and flattening. For all the grunts to see and Archer as well, the edges of the flag, once a Rocket flag, seemingly destroyed by someone.

Though the rest of the grunts pressed ahead, slowly walking into the open space of the terminal, Archer looked down at the flag, mesmerized by it. Beneath it, beside his boot, the smattering of blood indicated signs of a struggle.

Archer and his team walked hesitantly, walking in a line forward into the empty abandoned space of the terminal, pistols in hand poised and ready.

When they reached the back wall, they all turned, pressing their backs to the wall and easing along it, moving down a hallway to their right. Craning his neck forward to see past the line of grunts, Archer could see that the next terminal was sectioned off with a thin metal gate, one used by the terminal; it had been bashed in, crammed into the tiny opening of the hall by someone else. The rest of the terminal was completely dark, and even just beyond the hall where the next terminal began, a large section of a half-destroyed Rocket flag covering it. The only path available to them was the hallway in between, the path of light passing down over the floor ahead of them.

One of the Rocket grunts stepped out, wheeling around and standing directly centered in the entrance to the new hall, gun poised in outstretched arms. As soon as he did, a gunshot echoed down the hall, a splintering squib sound echoing out of the grunt's chest. A fine mist of blood shot out of the grunt's chest, a bullet-sized hole exploding out of the center of his uniform. A brief gasp escaped him, his hands seizing up and dropping the gun, letting it clatter loudly over the tile floor. He then dropped to his knees, staring blankly ahead and falling forward unconsciously.

Reflexively, Archer dropped to a squat at the base of the wall. He hadn't realized the grunt had stepped out, but it caught his attention as soon as he heard the gunshot. With the gun poised, he was the last one to the edge of the wall. Even though his eyes were transfixed at where the freshly dying body had collapsed into the hallway, he could hear the piercing silence of his team behind him as they froze. He kept his gun poised at the edge of the wall, ready to act.

"Get up."

Archer turned around, only to be faced with the end of a gun barrel. Looking up, a man towered over him, holding the gun, wearing a deep black trench coat. The man jabbed the gun at Archer, signalling him to obey, which he did. He set his pistol on the floor, rising up onto his feet, hands held in the air. Out of the corner of his eye, Archer's team of grunts remained on the floor, squatting close to the wall, watching.

"Now walk," said the man, jabbing the nose of the gun into Archer's rib cage, gesturing ahead of Archer.

Hesitant, Archer looked up at his new captor, at the piercing, young eyes that stared out beneath a black beret and above a tightly drawn cloth mouth guard. At the corners of his ears, Archer could see tufts of naturally reddish hair, seemingly foreign.

As he turned, Archer lifted his hands beside his head in a sign of surrender, walking into the hallway. It took all his strength not to let out a gasp of fear.

All down the hallway, along the wall, black-clad Rocket grunts stood on their knees, hands resting on their heads and facing the wall with their noses pressed to it. Looking further down, Archer could see a few policemen and women in the exact same pose. On the opposite wall, several men and women dressed similarly to the man behind Archer stood guard, carrying large automatic rifles, multiple Pokemon holstered to their belt, aiming their weapons at the backs of the grunts.

Archer was walked all along the hall, past the many dozens of captured Rocket grunts and their captors. He closely inspected these, their matching black beret, gray sheathes over their faces just below their nose. All wearing matching black vests with a white and blue shield stitched over their breast, matching gray pants and black combat boots.

At the very end of the hall, past the captured police officers, Archer was brought to what looked like a commanding officer, one wearing a tall black trench coat. His mask, placed where all the others had their gray sheathes over their mouth, was black and made of plastic, a long black hose running from the entrance of his mask to deep beneath his trench coat. Vents on the mask wheezed out in steady, inhuman breaths. On the pale, weathered face of the commanding officer, a deep red scar had been carved over the side of his face, passing close to his unusually gray eye, while the other was a deep chocolate brown.

Archer looked down beside the commanding officer. Down on his knees, Petrel hung his head down, a gun in the commanding officer's hand pressed to the back of his head. Both of his wrists were bound in thick cut rope in front of him, blood caked around where the rope pulled his hands together taut. Purple tufts of hair hung loosely over the top of his head, knocked loose by what looked like a struggle.

"Executive Archer, this truly a surprise," said the commanding officer. Beneath his black mask, either side of his cheeks curled up, implying a smile. A deep, foreign accent permeated his words.

Nodding softly, Archer looked up, seeing the man in the corner of his eye behind him still pointing the gun at his backside. He stared up into the eyes of the commanding officer, taking a deep breath.

"I'm pretty surprised too," said Archer.

Reaching up to his mask, the commanding officer pressed in on where the plastic bowed out and reached the opening of the tube running deep into his jacket. The mask released with a soft hiss, pulled away from his lips. An incredibly foul stench left the mask, the insides moist and unclean. Grinning through misshapen, ugly and beaten teeth, the commanding officer laughed.

"Welcome to the rule of Team Plasma."


	6. Chapter 5

_"Before our very age, we have known war and all of its horrendous might. It has managed to shape the world we live in today, believe it or not, all the pleasures it can offer as well as the same struggles we live with. It is for this reason we must accept war as a whole, not just as tragedy, because it is unavoidable in both its reach and importance. We must learn that war is just a continuation of the old policy, and peace is the reinvention. In that way, policy is the great barrier to peace that must be broken with the brutal trials of war."_

— _Professor Kauri_

The clanking, knocking sounds of armor and equipment resounded through the forest, the sounds of hundreds of different footsteps crunching through the trees, the sounds of countless speechless figures traveling through the forest all at once in a widespread pack. Through the dark pillars of wood, thick tree trunks of deep brown, several visible figures were seen passing between, moving in a single, western direction. In the distance, through dense white fog that shrouded the dark trees and turned them to bluish images, several more dark figures could barely be seen.

One of the figures, a tall man dressed in military-like uniform, a thick gray overcoat with long gray flaps over his front to conceal equipment strapped close to his chest, stood tall on a ledge of thick, swollen tree root. In his hand, a gun seemingly made of plastic with only a curved, nosed end to the rifle shape, he rested it on his knee, pulling the long strap that dangled over the side of the mysterious weapon and slinging it tight over his shoulder. From a pouch on his thigh, also masked by a long flap of cloth fashioned seemingly as a kilt, the man pulled a metal disk, holding it squarely in the palm of his hand. All around the disk were small metal bumpers, and the man pushed in, clasping it together.

On his face was an expressionless white mask, geodesic and abstract in the featureless shape it had. The mask was almost smooth in a rounded shape, with light reflecting several different near-invisible geometric edges that made up the surface of the mask. Twin black slits over the eyes indicated his point of vision. On the right side, the mask was burned deeply, black and charred.

A gloved hand grasped roughly at his arm, getting the man's attention. When he turned to see who had grabbed him, the disk in his hand was knocked away, falling to the forest floor, bouncing outside of his vision. Instead, the figure who had grabbed him held out his other hand, a thin black bar held. Looking up at the man who had grabbed him, he could see the blue stripe over breast, cut into the flap of the uniform like a tab, the rank of general on him. When he looked up to his face, he saw he did not have a mask on like the rest of the officers, instead just the beret of a commanding officer. Beneath his eyes was a black mask shaped like a muzzle, a long ribbed black tube running down into his jacket, air wheezing from the vents in the mask.

On the black bar in his hand, the commanding officer pressed in on a soft button hidden beneath the metal enclosure. A line of glowing blue energy flared along the upper edge of bar, before expanding into thousands of small vector lines above it, pulsing and floating in mid-air mere inches from the initial line, forming into a square map nearly hovering above the black bar. The gloved finger of the commander pointed in mid air at a single point on the map, a cubic structure at the base of a hill where the three-dimensional map bulged out, leading away from the forest plateau where their location was shown.

"I want all of your squadron atop this hill in twenty minutes," said the commanding officer. "You will hide and wait for my commands."

The man in the white, burned mask stared up at the officer expressionlessly, a pair of blank slats staring up at him.

"You will do as I _say_ ," seethed the commanding officer. He pointed towards the west, eyes wandering over the dark figures who had halted their line through the forest. " _All of you!"_

At the edges of the wreckage of the building, the tall looming mound of rubble that cascaded down towards the deep dark abyss of the rest of the destroyed fort ended with a wall, briefly to the side. An iron-enforced wall, gleaming in the dim light of the destroyed roof, separate and unique from the rest of the concrete fortifications that remained after its destruction. It stood out among the wreckage like a sore thumb, newer in its construction.

Sedna had walked past the entrance to the wall, walking around to the side where the mound of rubble dropped off into pure darkness. Looking down, she called Mars over, waving a beckoning hand towards her.

Mars was mesmerized by the wall they had reached, staring over the buckling plates and the construction of the strange wall. As she passed around to the side, she found herself looking at a wall beside it; the wall was an enclosure, a complete room isolated from every other room, built completely out of powerful iron fortifications. Like an isolated chamber or an enclosed piece of a space station, it was alone and separated from every other collapsed room in the building. A tall set of wooden struts held the structure off the ground, bracing it from tipping into the endless chasm.

As Mars stepped closer to Sedna, she followed where she was looking. The hand on her shoulder—Sedna's hand as she grabbed her to ensure her balance—nearly sent her over the edge. Catching her breath, she looked down, seeing a similar iron-walled and enclosed room had fallen down to the depths of the chasm, smashed and torn open as if some savage beast had been inside and forced itself out.

"When we first arrived here we had found that room exactly as that," said Sedna. "It had all of the necessary equipment inside for time travel, and it seemed as though the Rockets had kept all of their equipment in a blast-proof container in case something went... Wrong."

Mars frowned, staring deadpan into the wreckage. "Something very wrong indeed," she muttered under her breath.

As Sedna looked up, staring up into the wall of darkness far beyond her vision, a whistling wind knocking about the curls on her head, she took a deep sigh and took a few steps back, climbing up the ridge of shifting debris as she made her way back towards the new enclosure.

Mars stayed where she was, gazing down at the wreckage. It seemed as though she was staring at a white labcoat, the tattered remains that had caught on the jagged teeth of the beastly opening. As the white cloth flapped aimlessly in the whistling gale, Mars contemplated silently the fate of the Rocket scientist who had fallen prey to whatever mysterious force had torn the whole apart.

* * *

A heavy, icy gale kicked up from what seemed like the forest floor, whipping past the various soldiers. The flaps on their uniforms fluttered silently, knocking about the equipment beneath with more clanking and clapping. The fog was getting seemingly denser, moving through the forest with a quickening pace.

The commanding officer pulled his sleeve in front of his vision, grunting silently with a deep metallic groan through his mask. As he peered over the sleeve with his good eye, he reached behind his long overcoat, reaching into a black equipment bag slung over his shoulder and attached to his waist with thin black straps, rooting down into his bag as he pulled out something large, stashed and hidden deep beneath his overcoat. He removed the beret from his head, revealing wispy strands of dark, balding hair, putting the beret beneath his jacket and attaching it to his belt. Dipping his head beneath the flaps, he grabbed his mask and sealed it silently.

When the commanding officer revealed his head, he had a new mask on, one with pure silver over the completely smooth and featureless face of it. A small slot had been given over the bottom of the face where the long tube of his breathing mask escaped, the latch sealed to it.

The man with the burned mask looked up, staring up at the commanding officer with with his new silver, mysterious mask, staring silently, as he stayed still, hunched beneath a tree with exposed roots.

In the distance, a growl could be heard.

* * *

"This room was built identical to that one, preserving the Rockets' original design," said Sedna. "This way we can reconstruct the way that the original time travel premise was created by following the notes."

As Sedna was fumbling with the keyring in her hand to the padlock on the front of the door, Mars crested the ridge Sedna had moments earlier, standing with her hands held outstretched on either side for stability. As she entered the clearing, she looked at Sedna skeptically through her bangs as they batted around her brow, feeling the point her hair had been sculpted into waft silently.

"Yeah... But it doesn't sound like it ended to well for the Rockets either, did it?" asked Mars,

walking carefully towards Sedna.

Smiling Sedna looked up at Mars while she flipped out the key she was looking for, pinched between her fingers. She stepped up to the lock, sliding the key in with ease and turning sharply, hearing a click.

* * *

"You, come with me."

The grunt with the burnt mask turned upward, looking to the source of the voice near his head. High above him, using a ridge as a platform on the seemingly endless rising slope in the misty forest, an officer stood, staring down at him and waiting for compliance. With the tall black overcoat, the officer looked as tall as any one of the black trees of the forest and equally as ominous and monolithic.

"Yes sir," the grunt with the burned mask replied.

Taking a second to pull the same plastic gun with the beveled nose that was slung around his shoulder, the officer straightened his grip on the gun, letting the black strap fall down loosely as he adjusted the weapon.

"Ren, you can take that stupid-looking mask off."

Ren froze, staring at the forest floor. With the straightened, perfectly-cut sleeves of his uniform, he straightened his gloves, reaching up and grasping his white mask by burned section, removing it. The strap came loose from behind his head as he reached back behind it, undoing the long leather sections that covered his head on either side, letting the mask fall to his grip. Looking up with his very pale features, Ren stared up at the officer in the dark coat, his grayish white eyes staring out at him. All around his head was shorn, naturally reddish hair, cut like a soldier. Carefully, Ren slung the strap of his mask down around his belt and latched it, letting it hang off of his belt.

The officer at the ridge high above Ren gazed skyward, ensuring the power pack atop the gun was secured by smacking it. When he looked down, watching Ren approach, he gestured to an officer towards the bottom of the hill, watching as a small squad of five grunts started themselves up the tall hill, all while the rest of the men started once again in the direction they were going.

* * *

A loud, unearthly whine sounded from the hinge, the door pushing into the dark expanse of the aluminum, trailer-like room ahead.

Sedna leaned in and grabbed the keys that dangled from the door. The black carabiner popped in, attaching itself to a strap down by her uniform and her beltloop. With her boots at the opening, the lip of the entrance to the sealed room, the threshold to the dark expanse, Sedna paused, turning back to Mars, staring hopefully to her.

In turn, Mars was seemingly confused. She waited for Sedna to say something to break apart the silence, but she continued to wait, when she realized Sedna wasn't staring at her; she was staring past her. When she turned to look over her shoulders, she saw over the horizon exactly what she had meant to see. The seemingly hovering, suspended platform of the gurney; Vesta's resting place for the time being. The cool gray overcast clouds were background to him, cold wind whipping past him and kicking up his greenish bangs.

"I'm worried, but that's nothing new," said Sedna, wistfully.

Mars turned her head back towards Sedna, watching with mild interest as Sedna philosophized and waiting for her to continue on.

Something became overturned in the aluminum room, crashing to the floor with a gentle clanking and the tinkling of broken glass spilling across linoleum. It echoed through the dark opening of the trailer-sized room. It caught Sedna's attention, making her head whip around and look into the inside, and then made her move into action.

Sedna stepped over the metal lip, entering the dark of the room, walking around the open door and heading towards the center. She paused as she cleared the door, staring into the far end of the trailer, a green glow appearing on the surface of her face as light bounced down the room.

Curious, watching for Sedna's reaction as she stepped just barely within her line of sight, Mars walked in and stepped over the line, feeling her boots clatter on the linoleum. The smell of chlorine met her nostrils powerfully, making her nose choke. It was then that she realized she had been hearing gentle, faint voices the whole time.

 _ **"My goodness! That is a very bright light! Is—Is that the sun? Oh my gosh! What an incredible thing that is! It's sooo bright!"**_

The voice came swimming towards Mars, seeming echoing and distant but familiar all the same, even if she had never heard this voice before. The cutesy, squeaking voice seemed to wrack her senses, something clawing at her deep down inside. There was something about the voice that was like nails on a chalkboard, perhaps its otherworldly sound, that it sounded like the soul of a person screaming out, or that it was simply not a human's. It was something else, something she couldn't fathom until she saw, and that pushed her further into the trailer.

* * *

Hearing the grass crunch behind him took Ren from the scenic landscape ahead of him, and turn his focus towards the grunt approaching him from behind. His features, cold and distant, communicating that he was still lost in a deep train of thought, softened as he recognized the familiar walk of his companion.

"You look so glum, Ren," said the masked grunt. As he walked down the hillside, taking wide, confident steps, he raised his hands like some kind of sultan or sovreign, punctuating his predicated question. "It's friggin gorgeous out!" he proclaimed.

Smiling with a deep snort of air, Ren took a wayward glance towards the landscape. The hillside they stood on put them at the crest of a valley, a landscape sloping down to a deep, grassy trench with a wide divide to the next crest of a hill. At the foot of the valley rested a collapsed building, a warehouse-like fortress: a Team Rocket hideout. The mist had largely cleared from where they were, but the distant sky was overcast, hiding the afternoon sun. In the distance, a scattered flock of Spearow fluttered across in their black shadows, mere echoes of their cries reaching them.

The leather strap behind the grunt's head came undone, the white mask falling forward and catching in his hands. Long streaks of black hair fell back over his shoulders, curling at the tips, compressed down from the leather harness on the back of the mask but slowly expanding out into its full volume. Dark, intense features on his face focused ahead of him.

"Time travel is such a trip," said the grunt. "I wasn't ever planning on coming to the Johto region, but I really _really_ wasn't planning on going back in time eight years, ever."

"Such a poet, Kai," Ren said to fill in the background of the whistling wind.

Though Kai squinted and gazed out beneath his dark brow, looking out over the serene landscape, he looked down to Ren. Strapping the mask to his utility belt, Kai seethed silently, heading down a few feet down the slope of the hill and standing in front of Ren, grimacing.

"A 'poet'? Let's get one thing straight," spat Kai, "I don't have a case of 'being a huge puss' like you do, alright? I don't cry at sunsets and other bullshit like that."

Ren couldn't help but grin, chuckling, almost giggling like a schoolgirl.

"Excuse me Mr. Kai, but I don't recall giving you permission to remove your mask."

Turning upward over his shoulder, Ren watched as the same officer with the tall black uniform stood tall over the two of them, several feet up on the hill where it flattened out at the foot of the forest. In his hands was a pair of black, gunmetal-encased binoculars, a solitary blinking light on the case indicating they were still on. As a cold gale brushed through the valley, the officer's long coat swaying in the breeze, his features remained stony and secure in his fixed point of command.

After giving Ren a wayward glance, Kai planted his footing a little firmer on the grassy hillside, mindful of the mask attached to his hip. He also took a mental note of the mask attached to Ren's hip, similarly to his. The plastic weapon fluttered softly behind him as, in the breeze, Kai tried to appear as resolute as the officer.

"Didn't you ask Ren to take his mask off earlier?" asked Kai, feeling his stomach shoot into his throat as he challenged a superior.

This gave the officer some pause, himself walking down the hill while holding the leather belt firmly attached to his uniform around his waist, watching the shifting ground beneath him. The plastic weapon was held in his hand, the rigid grip in his hand with his finger slung over the trigger, held softly. As he approached Kai, he reached over his shoulder with his head, spitting powerfully at the ground before turning to face Kai.

"Yeah, and a few others too. I don't want to see your stupid, smug-ass face around here, so you keep the stupid mask on, got it?"

As Kai gave Ren another passing glance, Ren smiling coyly, Kai swallowed, then shot the officer a wayward look. He found himself on the verge of speaking, swallowing and silently clearing his throat to protest, but he found himself seizing up, mentally blocking out the words that burned on his lips. All through this split-second mental debacle, he watched as the officer continued to stride down the hillside and approach the two. On his right, Kai still saw Ren was savoring the officer's remark at him, choosing to meet Ren with a knowing smile.

Staring out over the horizon towards the wreckage of the Rocket Fortess, the officer gave Kai a hard kick to his shin, getting a wince out of the young grunt as he turned his attention to respecting his authority, standing tall and tucking his arms behind his back. Giving a passing glance to Kai, the officer moved close to Ren, putting a hand on his shoulder and jostling it softly as he continued to survey the landscape.

"I've heard good things about you, Mister Ren. Don't think I would've chosen you for this mission for any other reason," said the officer.

"Yes captain," said Ren, keeping the gloved hand on his shoulder in the corner of his vision.

The officer—the captain—stepped forward, keeping his hand on Ren's shoulder as he stood before him and observed him with a weariness, making sure that to Ren he was the forefront of his attention. He hunched over slightly, watching Ren's expressions and staring intently at him. The leathery fingers of his gloves flexed, firming his grip on his shoulder.

"Do not think your good deeds are going unnoticed. You are quickly becoming the best of Team Plasma. No doubt in my mind that the Supreme Leader will make you Shadow Triad in no time," said the captain. "I will see to it that you are well taken care of and that you will see some fruits to your labor, so long as you are in my care—and so long as you remain _loyal,_ something that you shall have no issue maintaining with your current track record."

Though Kai stood as firm and as resolute as he possibly could, mindful of the pain his shin had endured moments earlier, Kai gave a passing glance to the captain as he leaned into Ren. Something welled up inside of him, something he couldn't explain. He watched carefully, looking almost confused as the intense conversation went on.

Something electronic buzzed inside the captain's jacket; a static crackle that echoed from the plastic casing of a radio. With a lingering, intense glare at Ren, the captain removed the hand that rested on Ren's shoulder and used it to open his jacket, reaching in with the other hand to remove the radio from the holster on the inner lining of his jacket. Clasping his officer's jacket, the captain flipped the radio around, dialing up the volume louder and pressing in on the 'TALK' button, holding it close to his mouth.

"Go ahead."

 _"Sir, we've located the downed craft. We have it here at the foot of the Iruban Forest, just before the valley run to the Fortress. Twelve men are stationed and fully-armed to protect it. It looks like it'll fly again."_

"Excellent. Orders from the general?"

 _"Continue as planned. We will reconvene at the entrance to the Fortress. Engineers will run a few engine tests on the craft to ensure it does okay."_

The volume to the radio clicked off with the resounding sound of plastic, the dull radio static coming from the speaker on the front of the radio coming to dead silence. Pausing as he thought, the captain opened his jacket once more, finding the fabric holster on the inside of his jacket and tucking it on the inside. He then took a moment, staring blankly out as he finished folding his jacket in.

Without looking to either Ren or Kai, the captain started up the path that ran along the edge of where the hill sloped down steeply, walking away from them.

"Meet at the point at 1400 hours, we'll start the raids then," said the captain.

Standing where they were in place, both Ren and Kai watched as the captain left their presence, leaving far ahead of them and heading down towards their positions. The wind swept between them, the cold gray clouds moving overhead and quickly behind them with the gale.

"'Quickly becoming the best of Plasma', huh? You don't even need to toot your own horn with talk like that," said Kai, prodding with his words.

Ren didn't react. Instead he continued to stare down at where the captain had just left them, maintaining a cold shoulder as he remained transfixed, hypnotized by the captain's words. As he left the dreamlike trance he took careful steps to turn himself, righting himself and his body to meet where his head had turned, as he looked to the obscured Fortress for some kind of menial comfort in his thoughts. On his shorn hair, Ren felt a chill run over his scalp, making his brow twitch and wrinkle.

Seeing as Ren had narrow or nearly no reaction to what he had said to him, Kai, clearing his throat, took a few steps down onto the dirt trough in the ground, what could only barely be considered a path, stepping into the muddied section of the ground. He kicked a few rocks loose of their muddied trappings, making a meager plaything of the rock with the hammered standard-issue boots he had. He cleared his throat a little harder, seeing if he could get Ren's attention.

"I suppose that would've been a bad time to bring up your girlfriend to the captain, eh?" Kai tried, sighing and staring off into the distance when he didn't think it would do much.

"Shut up."

Wincing, Ren's voice pierced the near silence that Kai had enjoyed, however awkward it was. More significantly, it derailed Kai's train of thought, turning it to the subject he had just brought up.

"Hey now," Kai raised his hands defensively, knocking his mask about from where it was slung to his waist, "I'm your friend, but even the most foreign bystander can smell a bit of _chemistry_ between you two—"

"Athena and I are just friends. We're _friends_ , nothing more. It's strictly professional."

"Thou doth protest too much, milady."

"Shut up."

Grimacing, Kai undid the strap from his belt, letting his mask drop towards the ground mere seconds before his hand caught the rim of it. The straps flung themselves forward, and as Kai put the round mask into both his hands, he put it up to his face with enough force that his straps flung back over his ears and he took the straps, tightening them with relative difficulty, fumbling with the brass rungs that dotted the strap. He popped the peg in, straightening the thick leather harness over his dense lengths of black, curling hair. The white mask adjusted tightly to his face, providing the blank and ominous look desired by the mask.

Slinging the gun in his hands forward, Kai jammed his power pack further into the slot on the plasticene gun, moving in towards the path and several steps ahead of Ren, taking the first few steps that began the march towards the lookout for the Fortress.

* * *

Behind a seemingly suspended tube of glass, a bright green light nearly blinded Mars, reflecting off the walls and obscuring the figure that emitted it. The sound of the metal door slamming beside her made her flinch as she realized her senses were off balance, out of tune for what was happening, confused as to what was happening beyond a subconscious level. Even now, in the total darkness of the space, the light was incredibly blinding. Even moreso, the level of sound present in the room was disturbing.

" _Celebi_! Everything is okay, just please calm down!" Sedna rose her voice over the occasion.

 _ **"Missus SEDNA! Nothing is very much even**_ _ **remotely**_ _ **okay! Nothing is! Not even one**_ _ **teensy**_ _ **! Yourself and your friend are in incredibly grave danger! Please hurry and get away!"**_

Mars found herself paling, her good health starting to fall as the overwhelmingly confusing sensations picked away at her constitution. She felt herself growing ill and incredibly sick, the urge to vomit boiling deep in her stomach. Through the dim, sickeningly green light that plastered all of the walls, Mars' hand found a good table to rest herself against, and almost immediately thereafter rest her arm against as she caught her breath. It was as though her ears were bleeding, Celebi's wails and cries for help piercing her very skull.

"No one is in danger! We are friends, good friends! We have more reports for The Time Beast, more findings and research! We have been very hard at work, and we wanted to make sure you were okay. Please, Celebi, we have a guest who is eager to meet you finally."

Celebi's cries turned infinitely worse, the shrill-laden echoes familiar to a baby with a terrible tantrum, echoing off the steel walls of the enclosure.

 _ **"NOOOOOO! We all must go very immediately! There are strangers—dark, dark strangers all coming for us! And—And she! She is not one of the guests you said we would be having! And Misster Vesta! Misster Vesta is gone too! This is all so very, very incredibly so very badly wrong! All of it! It all points to evil signs. Evil and nasty visions of the future for which I have very clearly seen!"**_

In the dim lighting, Sedna's dark features turned. She scowled deeply, a headache pounding deep within her temples, all despite an incredible effort on her part to remain very cool during this encounter. Sedna felt her hands curl to deeply knotted fists in a pure, distilled rage.

"Celebi, stop this at once! We need your help! Vesta is very ill."

The wails turned unintelligible, but the level of increasing volume leveled off. Celebi's squealing, panicked voice began to shrink in both volume and comprehension, turning to a dull whine before turning to nothing at all. The ethereal, otherworldly glow emanating from around Celebi's body, an aura of blinding proportions, began shrinking down and turning to a dull smoke that surrounded the still dark image of Celebi's figure, a tinge of light surrounding hazily, until the light ended with the noise.

In the darkness, Mars found her breath being caught audibly, filling the near silent enclosure. The silence was palpable, incredibly disturbing. As her constitution reaffirmed deep in her chest, her heart swelling with strength, she found her posture straightening, lifting herself in a catlike way.

 _ **"D-Did they hurt Vesta? Or—Or was it... Him?"**_

"I'm going to turn on a light, Celebi. Will you be okay with that?"

 _ **"Y-Yes. I think so."**_

"Good."

A very familiar metal clicking sound broke the silence of the dark room. Immediately, the light from a lamp at the far end of the room turned on and flooded the room with it's warmth. The dim, warm light that emitted beneath the old lampshade—a lamp seemingly recovered from the depths of the Rocket Fortress' wreckage—made the laboratory-like space seem more homely.

It took some time before Mars' eyes fully adjusted to the dark, but her vision brought her to a different version of the laboratory from when she had first entered. Blinking several times and furrowing her brow, she found her eyes slowly tracking and pacing over the various devices inside the room, examining the space of the laboratory. Old, white and box-shaped devices filled the room, dirt and cobwebs obscuring the painted white metal with the sheen of a refrigerator, the mechanical and hard edges of the design communicating strength seeming moot in its own weakened state. Still, the blackened metal interfaces with faded blinking lights were still functioning, providing all the support it could to the chamber at the end of the room. Machines with faded and hazy glass tube screens had electronic lines racing across the display, dials ticking beside it as it measured and recorded the information for several different key variables.

In the center of the farmost wall, a tall glass tube hung seemingly from the ceiling, poised in a metal enclosure that seemed to be mounted to the ceiling. On either side of the glass tube were thick metal pylons that held the top structure up, cables and hoses running up the pylon with some twisted around it. Large hoses connected to the base at the bottom, where thick metal brackets jutted from the rounded structure like feet, mounted to the floor. All around the rim of the base were clear indicators of a second glass covering, a curved enclosure that ran along a track in the wide base. The piece of glass in question stood behind the main structures, obscured by the pylons, the cables and hoses, and a figure in the center.

Celebi was weak. Two clear tubes about the same thickness and consistency of straws jutted from twin, incredibly tighetned nostrils on the front of its large head. The papery skin around the nostrils had turned a tender pink, not irritated but extremely inflamed. All around its face, Celebi's skin was papery and ragged, looking frayed in certain edges where it curled about. There were signs its face had been a bright, healthy and neonish green at a certain point in its life, but now it was a dull shade of yellow, old and pale, much like an old fingernail. The black markings around Celebi's eyes seemed to mask the deep lines all around that had become engrained into its skin like grooves on worn rock. The glassy eyes it had were still glassy and carried the last shred of evidence that Celebi had been full of life at some point, still a crystal blue as deep as the sea.

Mars found herself transfixed, watching as she got closer and saw all the different tubes that were attached to Celebi introveinously. She caught a passing glance at the molded plastic chair that was fitted for its body, the straps that held it safely inside the elevated chair and the first hints of a head support hidden behind the hay-like tufts of hair that covered the back of Celebi's head, Mars was caught off-guard, meeting the piercing gaze of Celebi, meeting with the pained stare that pierced something deeper than what Mars could perceive. Then, breaking the icy silence, something whirred deep beneath the wide base of the structure Celebi was inside of. Mars watched, her eyes still locked on the space where Celebi's had been staring back at her, as Celebi looked up at the various small lights in the roof of the enclosed structure it was kept in, making the structure feel that much more like a pod. The whirring sound deep in the base rose to a peak, dying off, then being replaced by the rattling of glass as the door came around its curved track in the glass. Overhead, the tube of glass lowered and enclosed Celebi, locking her inside the structure. All the while, Mars watched, the layers of hazy glass blocking her out and making Celebi seem more distant.

"Vesta went to sleep for two weeks while we used the machine, keeping him alive and making sure that we recorded everything. We have the document here too, but we haven't looked over it. I haven't even scratched the surface on what happened in that state," said Sedna.

At the base of the platform Celebi's chamber was on, a speaker crackled to life, the echoing sounds of its breathing coming through in electrostatic waves.

 _ **"Missus Sedna, the maker! Two weeks? Did I not warn you of the others who had tried even a week?"**_

Celebi's voice came through in crackles, screeches and squeals muffled by layers of sealed glass. Key points in its speaking pattern made the speaker's replication mildly incomprehensible, peaking out and turning muddled and warped, accentuating the inhuman, otherworldly characteristics of Celebi's speaking patterns. Despite the faraway, chiding tone Celebi used, it seemingly didn't raise its voice, remaining a conspicuously low tone like it was suspicious. Its body didn't seem that animated, reflecting the tired, exhausted qualities it seemingly kept. The green aura returned in extremely mild waves and seemed to back the life force of Celebi.

"I maintained his vitals. I was responsible for his good health despite all this. I was careful, believe me. We had to make progress, we've been so behind. Vesta was accepting of the risks, almost eager, and I made sure that everything went okay," said Sedna. "We were careful. We were responsible."

Celebi had maintained its rapport with Sedna, filling in the spaces of time with conversation and otherwise considering what Sedna was relaying to her. Now was the first serious pause she had had, and it took her a moment to process what Sedna had said. Carefully, the large, globe-like eyes turned, staring down at the reflective sheen of glass that came from the bottom of the tube, pondering. Then, the smoky colored, papery eyelids shut, trilling softly over her eyes as it thourght.

 _ **"Missus Sedna... Did you truly, absolutely positively take the very bestest care of Misster Vesta? Did you?"**_

The words, artificial and produced by an alien and warped speaker at the far end of the enclosed room, seemed to pierce Sedna. She lurched forward ever so slightly like she had been wounded by the words, her breathing almost strained and unusual, irrhythmic.

From the corners of her vision, Mars found herself staring at Sedna, coming to a horrified conclusion.

"I... I..." stammered Sedna.

* * *

"Go, _now._ "

The sound of the captain barking in his ear made Ren flinch, turning his head over his shoulder from where he was hunched down by a shrub. He gazed up at the captain for a long time, staring deeply as he processed what he said; though the words were clear he didn't understand why. Turning his head back, Ren gazed out at the scene ahead, the scene beyond the darkened shroud of the forest, laying in the dim sunlight that streamed from the overcast, cloud-covered sky. Ahead, the Rocket Fortress stood, a crumbling visage of former glory.

Something shifted quickly beside Ren. Looking beside him, Kai had gotten up from his position beside the leaf-bare shrub, crawling across in his hunched position towards more of the shrub coverage, keeping low. He moved quickly, hunched down with the rifle poised in his hands, climbing towards the edge of the clearing. Kai, peeking his head up above the dark green vegetation, eyed the men at the far end of the forest clearing opposite him where the once wide dirt road that led up to the fortress made a dense, leafy divide in the incredibly thick forest.

"Mister Ren, _go_. That's an order."

Ren was distracted, watching the forest as several dozen more heads popped up through the brush, the masked men surrounding the fortress. He watched as a group of eight men all stood up, making silent, actioned gestures to one another as they scrambled across the grassy clearing, quickly falling into formation. In the mess of men getting together, Kai, getting to his feet from where he had squatted, sprinted across the wild grass, running to join them and sneaking in with their numbers.

Behind Ren, the captain silently scowled, watching as the men moved in towards a destroyed sidewall in the entrance of the fortress, sneaking into the concrete structure and out of sight, unaware that Kai had just joined their ranks. He gave a wayward, silent gaze towards Ren as he watched, watching with an icy demeanor.

"Something is wrong..." Ren muttered beneath his breath, watching as a second squadron assembled silently, the muted jingling of strapped equipment and the hushed thuds of combat boots on grass the only sounds of their intense collaboration.

Breaking his streams of thought, a hand roughly grasped his shoulder strap, pulling Ren over from where he squatted. As he tried avoiding stumbling over, Ren grasped for the soft earth beneath his boots for stability, trying to keep his rifle from dropping to the ground but trying to keep himself upright as his legs scrambled to stay beneath him. Soon he was faced with a bigger draw to his fearful attention; a direct, face-to-face confrontation with the captain, who too had squatted down, and was now grasping at the other shoulder strap going across Ren's uniform.

"Fall in line with Squadron C or you will answer to the General, not _me_."

As Ren blinked, adjusting to the closely-held visage of the captain, he found himself staring up, something like pure, ice-filled terror sank into his psyche and burned through his expressionless face. A cold, uneven gasp left him as he focused on the situation, and began to nod.

Finished, the captain released his grasp, running his hand over the strap on Ren's uniform, as if to straighten the black leather. "And please, Ren, put the mask on," he said, before standing up, giving a glance to the positions of the men, and walking down towards the forest where more leaders were met.

As Ren continued to focus on the space in front of his vision where the captain had been moments ago, Ren found himself intentionally slowing his breath, returning to the reality at hand. Gazing over towards the men opposite the former dirt road, Ren could see another squadron picking themselves up and running towards the grassy hillside along the fortress. Ren adjusted his stance, keeping low and running along the many different shrubs that lined the clearing.

* * *

 _ **"Such an incredible danger awaits you all! Why oh why did you come to us in such a time?"**_

"Celebi, we had no choice! Vesta needs you, now more than ever. This is our most desperate hour."

Beyond Sedna's pleading, Mars stood ostentiably, watching with crossed arms in incredulity as Sedna made a stand that reached seemingly out of character for her, breaking her controlled facade as she moved more desperate. She swallowed heavily, feeling dizzy as both Celebi and Sedna exchanged verbal blows as to their arrival.

Something happened that seemed even more puzzling to Mars: the dialogue grew silent. Though Sedna was seemingly exhausted, having used up every argument she had to plead her case, Celebi seemed all-together different. Celebi seemed pensive, lost in thought as its bulbous eyes, dimly reflective as they stared off into space, continually turned upward towards the braced ceiling, staring at something that only it could see. Panting, exasperated breaths left its tiny mouth, clear rubber tubes that reached up towards her nostrils rushed distilled oxygen to her, pumping her full of life when she was incapable of it herself. Beneath the sullen, colorless veneer of her eyes, an array of colored crackles came from deep within the seeming vast depths of her irises, shining in colors that Mars couldn't perceive.

A groan, much like one of a frustrated child left Sedna as she pounded her boot into the linoleum floor, rattling the floor softly with a hollow thump. It broke the reflective, otherworldly silence Celebi had created with one of primal, deep-seated frustration.

"Celebi _please_ ," said Sedna, her voice turning to pleas. " _I'm sorry_. I let this happen, this is my mistake and my mess to clean up, but I can't do it without your help. Please, if you don't do it for me do it for Vesta—if anything to save him from me. This is my error, not his or yours."

Still, Celebi remained silent. The only sound coming from it was the slow, pained breaths, crackling through the small speaker at the base of the device. Its tiny lungs echoed with a strange hollow sound, though Celebi payed no mind, continuing to stare skyward.

 _ **"The danger is not for Vesta alone or for any individual here—no most certaintly not at all—it is for all of us. All of us are in danger, at this very exact precise moment... This is something completely and totally different... Something I can hardly describe in it's full complete and absolutely total state, all something I cannot describe without seeing... Seeing our own fear... Seeing it deep within ourself. This is something we are most certain... This is very incredibly wrong..."**_

Sedna had turned her back to Celebi, as she had been trying to cover her pain and shame as she described her true feelings moments earlier. Her eyes were heavy and exhausted, wet sticky trails of former tears running down over her cheeks, glistening as she turned her head up. As Celebi's verdant aura glowed in a new, pulsing intensity, the far wall reflected it, lighting Sedna's features in warped tones of green. Despite being surrounded in the throes of her own pain and anguish, Sedna's features softened, her brows rising and eyes lighting, sparking to life as she began to consider Celebi's haunting words. Slowly, she turned, facing Celebi despite the obvious remains of her emotional distress.

Celebi, instead of gazing skywards like she was trying to perceive the heavens, turned its gaze to Sedna, letting her vision wander languidly over her.

 _ **"There is a new danger... Something that reaches beyond the stretches of time, like a whip lashing down on us, unrestrained and untamed... Beastly... A new danger that has been given to us unexpectedly..."**_

Wracking her brain, Sedna took a few staggered steps towards one of the aluminum tables in the room, one slightly overturned. She leaned against it, pressing the palms of her hands to the cool metal surface as she leaned down, letting her tangled brown curls fall over her forehead. A few short breaths exited her nostrils in pained gasps. A hand slid up into the depths of her white labcoat, a curled fist pressing over the apex of her chest where a white, glossy chestplate of armor was strapped to her. Pressing in, she could feel her heart pounding.

"The Time Beast..." Sedna said, echoing Celebi's utterance of 'beast'. "Something from the past? Something we've overlooked...?"

 _ **"Something from the future. Something we could not have seen, witnessed or perceived so far earlier. This is something beyond."**_

Sedna grimaced, punching the table with a rattling clatter. She, who had been hanging her head, looked up to Celebi with a fire in her eyes. "You swore before Vesta and I never to reveal information about the future. Now I think would be an excellent time to break that oath."

 _ **"I cannot—"**_

" _Celebi_ if you expect myself, Vesta and Commander _Mars_ to aid you in this crusade we need to know. We're already up to our waists in this and I get the feeling that's just the tip of the iceberg if I'm supposed to believe you."

A frigid, palpable silence followed Sedna's plea. It seemingly moved the immutable willpower Celebi could maintain with its frail form, bringing a hush over the small, darkened enclosure, despite the warm light that eminated from the standing lamp. In the silence, the warmly lit atmosphere—the light coming from the old lamp—seemed to fade, muted by the solemnity of Celebi's outlook.

 _ **"There have always been forces of... Very bad. Lots and lots of bad. You name them Rockets, Aquas and Magmas, Galactics... They have had lots and lots and lots of evil, wicked and naughty names to hide themselves behind... Evils that took shapes in clans, tribes and gangs... Empires... And now Teams... These very, very bad people are a team from the future, ones that seek destruction, and after awhile... They get it. They get the destruction they've so longed for... They are the things bad dreams are made of—something you try to forget and get rid of so many times that they come back in far worse intensities than any before... They call themselves a 'Team', but it is a wicked, nasty lie. A shroud for their real selves... Something to hide in their cowardly ways behind, even if they are the least cowardly of any evil seen yet..."**_

 _ **"They come from far away, a land you all have never heard of, but soon it will be the center, the very beating heart of all things that you know and love. They will take over that land, conquer and destroy. It is there, it is alive and it is real today. It is small. It will be more powerful in the future."**_

 _ **"They are called Team Plasma, and they are very bad, most evil. Nothing can prepare you for what they will bring. They have arrived now and are coming by their mandate, because it was by His hand that they have arrived and so have you. They will kill and destroy you."**_

 _ **"Seven years from now, the remnants of Team Galactic will explode into civil war across the many very foreign regions, and from the ashes of Team Galactic will rise a new order, an order governed without Pokemon. Though what remains of Team Galactic will try to hold together, one of their many arms will split off, and land in this far off land of Unova, and they will know the horrors of what Team Galactic has tried and failed to do. They will know that even the Pokemon of Legends cannot save humanity. They will know that men must go on their own in order to be free of what Pokemon have done to them. They will make the world go back to where it was before the Great War, where humans and Pokemon were seperate. They will bring weapons, incredibly destructive and disruptive weapons to our shores, and they will rule by that alone. There will be no match for them. Team Galactic will fall, and with it make way for Team Plasma."**_

 _ **"And they are coming... They are coming now."**_


	7. Chapter 6

_"Men should be punished for what they do. Actually, when it happens, it should be less comical."_

— _Margaret Hammond, p.725 of 'Carter Undone', reprint 1925._

 _Translator's Note: The original foul language has been removed from all reprintings and reproductions of the original quote._

* * *

Opening the door of the enclosed room made everything that much more blinding, sunlight streaming in from behind the sealed door. The room, already lit by it's own warmth, was overwhelmed by the purity of the sun, making both Mars and Sedna squint.

"There's a collapsed elevator shaft over to the left. It's easy to scale, and if you get atop it you can see the foot of the valley where the forest is. See if anyone is coming, and let me know," said Sedna. "I'm putting Vesta in with Celebi, and I'll be able to help soon."

Sedna was standing on the other side of the door, gripping the rubber seal of the door as she held it open. She had walked out onto the gravelly, rubble-covered ground, stepping up over a mound as she walked behind the door, giving a wayward look to the horizon. She squinted, eyes adjusting to the bright yet overcast skies, deep brown curls batting against her brow as the wind came. Looking down into the dark of the room, Sedna gazed at the dark form that was Mars, as Mars stepped out into the light of the space and made herself visible.

A dull, unamused look permeated Mars' face, coming through her icy features. As she stepped over the metal lip of the airstream-like structure, stepping into the crumbled remains of the fortress and walking up onto the risen ground by Sedna, she kept her arms at her side defensively, carefully watching Sedna with a dark intensity. As she crossed around Sedna, Mars watched as Sedna picked up on this lingering hostility Mars had. She had only paced so far, standing on the other side of debris with her boots firmly planted in the ground, arms crossing as she looked over the horizon.

"Something wrong?" asked Sedna. The door in her hand whine on its hinges, the seal of the door resting against the reflective metal door ledge.

With her eyes on the horizon, wind blowing past her and knocking the round, conically taut skirt around on her hips, Mars gave Sedna what looked like a passing glance. "Just seems like an odd time to care about our safety," she said coldly.

The same, intrinsic frustration that Sedna expressed in the chambers with Celebi was starting to bleed through in her angry expressions. Gritting her teeth, Sedna stifled the feeling, trying her best to keep it down while she confronted Mars. She too crossed her arms, looking down and swallowing, biding her time to think of a proper response to Mars' stabbing statement.

"I... Mars, _please_ don't be like this... Yes, I've made a few mistakes— _quite_ a few mistakes—today and during my stationing in Johto, but for me they were unavoidable," said Sedna. "I'm sorry and I hope you forgive me at some point—maybe not today or the near future—but that you will eventually."

Mars nodded softly, meeting Sedna's pleading eyes with a look of her own, boiling beneath her freezing skin, devoid of expression.

"Let's get Vesta out of here."

* * *

The collapsed elevator shaft was a tall column of stacked metal struts and poles, once obscured by brick and thin sheets of dry wall that had sank over and collapsed downward. At the top, constructed largely of steel girders, round iron wheels where pulleys had formerly been and mechanized metal-enclosed boxes covered the top of what Sedna had described to be something of a watchtower. All along, old cables and various connectors hung over the side, snaking down the structure like overgrown vines. The snapped line, the long connection between the elevator car and the powerful motor at the very top, hung limply with frayed ends to the thickly coiled steel cable, once taut but now loose and swaying. The elevator car was nowhere to be seen, but the state of the surrounding walls and the snapped cable gave enough clues as to where it was.

The endless sea of rubble seemed to level out for where Mars was, as she walked to the far edge of where the debris sloped down and met with a concrete platform, the remaining rubble scattered about. As Mars stepped onto the wide, expansive concrete table that led to the collapsed elevator shaft, she felt the ground wobble, the platform bending under a new sensation. She slowed her steps as she walked across, passing by some of the remaining burned furniture and the scrapped remains of thin office carpet across the ground.

Around the elevator shaft, the old sheeted walls collapsed down with the brick coverings, split down, out and over like a banana peel, or the frayed ends of a reed, exposing the internals of the elevator shaft with its frame-like metal bars. Mars stepped over the wall that had fallen forward, walking towards the almost papery dry wall as it bent towards her and onto another collapsed section of brick. Some of the released tension in the dry wall kicked up clouds of white dust under Mars' legs, smattering and coating the black leggings of her uniform as she walked over it. The brick wall section she stood on sloped up towards the metal frame of the elevator shaft, straight to an exposed section flanked by two sections of brick and drywall, cables still fastened to the wide beams.

The metal bar was cool to the touch on Mars' bare hands, but the concrete and mortar still stuck on the poles was rough, sandpapery on her palms as she gripped them. It made her thankful that she had the bandage still on her one hand, but as she gripped it, not feeling the cold or rough surface, she switched instantly to regret, realizing that the grip would not be sufficient on the poles with the sheet of cloth inbetween her hand and the pole. Even moreso, looking down towards her feet, Mars lifted her leg up and crossed her boot over her knee, eyeing the chalky gray sole of her boot: the boot sole offered little to no grip with it's lined surface. Where the sole arched down to the jutting heel seemed to offer some support, and Mars tried it by wedging it over the first horizontal bar over the front. It provided some leverage, and she planted the second boot on the next bar up from it, beginning to scale it like a ladder.

About halfway up, Mars paused on the bar, looking down to where her skirt pressed to her thigh with the pole she was clinging to. She leaned on her side and slid a hand just below her stomach, feeling for a near invisible flap on her uniform and sliding her finger along it for the hidden zipper, undoing the skirt three quarters of the way. She then tucked it behind her midsection, attaching the half of her skirt to the other so that it was still attached to her hip, just slightly behind her rear, but not draping down like a skirt or protruding as she climbed. Her skirt tucked away, Mars could now focus on climbing around the side of the tower that led down closest to the valley.

Mars found her focus being drawn away. As she rested partially on her side, she stared waywardly down towards where the metal-enclosed room was, center to the incredible opening of the fortress. She watched as, through the rubble, Sedna raced to push Vesta towards the room at the foot of the wreckage on that level. Longingly, almost solemnly, Mars continued to gaze out towards the two tiny figures as they traveled quickly, even when they passed beyond her vision and into the metal-enclosed room.

Swinging her leg around, Mars let out a bestial grunt through gritted teeth, levying herself to the opposite side of the long vertical steel beam, her hand grasping at the old pole, finding her grip on a rusted-out junction of two horizontal beams. It took a moment for her to gain the strength, finding it in burying her head in her shoulder and muttering a silent affirmation in the space where only she could hear, Mars flexed her arm, feeling the one freshly placed down and secured on the horizontal bar she held, and the one where her hands had dug into a small makeshift hold in the side of the girder-like structure. She stood upright on the side, with her left foot wedged in the vertical girder and her right foot on a horizontal beam. She took the right foot and, taking a deep breath, lifted it from the horizontal beam. Mere seconds later, she swung her leg back and rammed it into the opening of the girder, hearing the thump that rattled the girder as she jammed it into the space. With her right foot below her left, she wedged the left foot out and, careful to ensure that it cleared her leg when she pulled it back, swung it around and found the next horizontal bar on the structure. Mars was then able to pry her hand free from where it had dug itself into the girder and hop onto the newer side of the wall she was scaling. When she pried her right foot from the opening in the girder, she gave a passing glance to her boots, seeing the deep black scuffs that marred the formerly white and gleaming surface.

The wind came louder and more brisk the further up the structure Mars got. This inspired her to move quickly, appearing through quick leaps up the various rows of beams and poles, moving with the grace and agility of an acrobat. She held herself close, the thin and nearly completely concealed muscles beneath her sleeves flexed, though they groaned with their extended disuse until now, and Mars groaned in kind. Gritting her teeth had exhausted her and she felt the beginnings of being winded, taking deep breaths through her nostrils in a vain attempt to keep her breath up. With her head held high, she refused to look down, even though it came instinctually for her to check how high up she was.

At long last, Mars' fingers slipped along something that neither had the thickness of a girder nor the ease of grasp that a bar or pole had. It was a thick, wide and boxy panel, one of many different ones lining the new structure. Mars couldn't look, her attention was too busy trying to get her over the last horizontal beam, which beneath her feet was becoming weaker. Soon Mars realized that the panel ledge that she was feeling for wasn't a very good handhold, and she found herself slipping. She slipped a mere few inches, before her fingers caught in an opening; an exposed slot where many of the old cables came through. A muffled gasp of pain came from Mars as, despite the edge of the exposed slot not being very sharp, still had a large amount of weight and leverage being placed on where the flesh of her fingers was fattest.

Mars took several small leaps, moving her lower half up the rest of the structure, putting more weight on her legs as she stood upright. As she tipped her head down just below the large platform just above her head where she held fast to, she caught a glimpse of the endless abyss below, just beyond where she was trying to look at the strength of the foothold she had found. The elevator shaft seemed to stretch for miles down through different half-destroyed levels of the building and even beyond to the underground depths. Down below, in the thin slices of sunlight, the crashed elevator car could be seen, caught between floors, the door half open. Though Mars couldn't see inside, she didn't want to. Swallowing, Mars carefully craned her head up and around the heavy platform she was just beneath; the large platform that housed the powerful engine that once lifted and lowered the elevator.

From her elevated stance, holding partially to the platform and staring out over the horizon between the two hills, the dense forest lay below and filled Mars' vision. Squinting, Mars looked into the depths of the forest, looking to spot anything she could see.

* * *

Sedna approached, walking carefully through the last vestiges of debris as she stepped onto the largely empty platform, the one leading up to the hollowed out and destroyed elevator shaft. Alone on the platform, she gazed skyward, seeing the top of Mars' head as she sat atop the lift platform at the very top of the elevator shaft. Crossing her arms, Sedna walked carefully, kicking rocks about and letting them scuttle across, choosing her words carefully.

"Do you see anything?" she finally asked.

Mars, with her legs folded beneath her as she sat atop the elevator shaft, stared out pensively at the horizon, the shifting forest as wind blew through it and made the various evergreen branches bristle and sway.

"A few things. Someone's out there," said Mars, "but if I'm up here they've probably spotted me. They probably already knew we were here."

Looking down from Mars to the horizon, squinting to see if she could see anything, Sedna let out a snort of air from her nostrils, thinking to herself.

Careful, Mars pulled herself up from where she sat on the platform, using the old and rusty pulley wheels at the very top to lift herself up onto her feet. She walked to the edge, squatting over, and letting her leg dangle down. She knew the exact horizontal beam that she wanted to step on, and when her foot made contact and she was able to lower herself onto it, Mars pulled herself down, letting the other leg dangle down and find the same beam and stand on it, her hand holding to a recessed panel as her last hold to the top. She then grasped the vertical poles of the structure beneath the platform and began lowering herself down, watching everything extremely carefully as she steadied herself along the wall.

With a pause on the side of the scaled structure wall, Mars looked down, seeing Sedna at the foot of the lower level platform as she busied herself with thoughts as her concerned brow showed. Hesitating where she was, Mars let off a gentle sigh.

"I do have a hunch for how we can get out of here," said Mars.

Sedna looked up. "You have a plan?"

"Kinda."

With her hands secured to the vertical poles, Mars hopped down a few steps, her hands whining on the poles as she slid down them. Beneath her, she approached the crumbled edge of a brick wall, wide enough for her to walk on. She hesitated to ensure that she would land properly, not as sure of her skills as she was when she first headed up, though now, through strained breaths, was much more exhausted than she was earlier.

When she landed on the wall's edge she turned down to Sedna, who was now closer after descending. With Sedna's intrigue, she had stepped closer to Mars, paying full attention to her.

"The climbing path down on the farthest side of the elevator is pretty clear," Mars said through panting breaths. She swallowed thickly. "It'll take us to the lower levels where we can sneak towards the hills behind us."

* * *

The elevator shaft ended abruptly, turning to a sloping stack of collapsed and former sections of wall. Mars, who had been grasping the last horizontal beam available, dangled her legs over the ground inches below her. Though she tried lowering herself to get closer, it was still a good three-to-four feet below her boots. With another, exasperated affirmation she muttered aloud, she let her fingers slip, propelling her down towards the floor.

A sound like a crash echoed out of the open space. Mars had landed on her feet and absorbed the shock, but with her arms spread at her side in a desperate and sudden bid for stability, she found herself still moving towards the ground, the momentum of her unceasing. She moved quickly down the sloped stack of walls, sprinting, hurtling in towards the darkness of the level below and beyond where she could see. Luckily, she found herself running into a smooth, debris-free section of the floor, her boots clattering on the concrete as it echoed throughout the roofed space of the floor she had arrived yet. It gave her ample space to slow down and eventually stop, letting her catch her breath.

Sedna, a much faster climber than Mars, brought herself down the elevator shaft exterior than Mars had, and soon found herself making the same leap that Mars was. With the expert grace of a gymnast, Sedna kicked herself off of where she stood, falling towards the ground in a slow spin. The side of her boot heel was the first thing to touch the ground, sending her spinning. Sedna tucked her limbs in, feeling her whole body roll with the grace of a rag doll, a clear accident, having little impact down the slope of stacked walls, zooming towards Mars. She then scuttled along the floor to a halt, resting on her side for several long moments.

When Mars realized Sedna wasn't getting up, she moved quickly to her side, kneeling down beside her, running her hands over her in a quick assessment of injury. Finding none other than a cut on her forehead that had only now begun to bleed, Mars ran a hand alongside Sedna's arm, jostling it softly.

"C'mon Sedna, let's get up. We've got to keep moving." Mars said beneath her breath.

Groaning, Sedna rolled up from her side to her back, lifting herself off the ground carefully. Resting on her elbows gave her a chance to breathe properly. As she did, she paused, hesitating for a moment as she gazed into the darkness of the level ahead. She had seen something approaching, carefully in the near distance, something Mars hadn't quite seen yet.

In a near instant, Sedna tucked her legs up onto her chest, then kicked them up, rolling herself forward. Her feet were perfectly positioned to land beneath her as she rolled forward and then immediately kicked herself up, legs expanding and launching her to her full height. She didn't spend too much time standing either, as she propelled herself forward with a few sprung steps, taking a light jog a few short feet ahead of her, before she made contact with someone.

"Stay where you—" commanded a dark figure, just beyond Mars' vision in the darkness. He was cut off, suddenly grunting out in pain.

Sedna was prepared from the start. As soon as she had moved forward she had moved her shoulders down in-between herself and the dark figure, her shoulder colliding with the ribs of the man and then immediately shifting back for her to throw her elbow up into his chin. A second wailing groan came from him as his jaw clamped together forcefully, which Sedna ignored and instead reached ahead of her towards the man's belly, grasping the directly in the center of the long barrel of a rifle in the man's hands. She pried it from his hands with a forceful yank, aiding in his stumble back in surprise.

Blinking in shock, Mars got to her feet slowly as she watched Sedna take another blow at the dark figure, taking a swift kick to his shins to make him collapse down to the floor, his body hitting with a cringeworthy thud. As she processed all of this, she looked just left of Sedna, seeing that another dark figure had emerged, dressed in similar military garb and armed with identical equipment that hung off his body, just like the man Sedna had just subdued. Unlike the man who Sedna had just taken the gun from, this dark figure still had his and he was cocking the upper barrel.

Time seemed to slow down for Mars. She only had instances to think of what she could do to save Sedna, lest let her get shot—shot?—with the unusual looking weapon, and she could only imagine what would happen next. She would much rather Sedna figure out how the weapon work before she did. Mars mentally did a checkup on her equipment, and her eyes immediately shot down to her utility belt where several of her Pokeballs were still lined up in their holsters. She rammed the top of the plastic housing where the Pokeball was held with her thumb, letting it fall into her hand. Immediately, without clicking the release, she flung the Pokeball with dead aim, sending it flying at high speed towards the dark figure who was now taking aim.

The Pokeball slammed into the side of the man's face, audibly smacking against his skull and sending him toppling backwards a step, shouting a loud obscenity in pain. As the Pokeball bounced off with a dull thud, a bright red flash of light expanded out of it, shooting across the space and in-front of Sedna. The flash of a red image of Purugly appeared moments before she materialized, pancaking down on the ground atop a previously unseen third dark figure who appeared.

The loud hard smack that the Pokeball had against he man's face was enough to both stop the second dark figure from firing and give Sedna time to notice him. She flung the gun around into her hand, her finger easily finding the trigger and squeezing hard while her hand steadied the underside.


	8. Chapter 7

_"History is an effort in the humanities, and we are all hacks."_

 _—Professor E.L. Ragwort, The 1973 Ragwort/Zinnia Debates_

* * *

The sloped nose of the gun pulsed, lighting briefly with the dull shot. Nothing came out.

Sedna kept the gun raised, pointed directly at the man's head. As she did, she watched as the man who had been hit by the Pokeball seized up. In horror, her eyes pacing over the man as nothing visibly happened to him, watched as he suddenly dropped his gun.

Fighting his basic urges, the man's face seized up, boiling red beneath the surface. His eyes jammed shut under an intensely pained brow, he suddenly let out a shout of pain, his teeth gnashing as he screamed out in pain.

Mars too was transfixed, not on the gun but on the face of the man. She didn't notice that, in the hand that hadn't been holding the gun, he clutched a knife. As the man suddenly and abruptly dropped to his knees, he flung his arm forward, blindly ramming his knife into Mars' calf, piercing the thin layer of the legging and sawing into the flesh with ease.

Mars screamed and kicked, jamming her shin up against his head, colliding with a dull thud. The man's hand had held on limply and let go of the knife's handle as soon as she kicked, but the knife was still stuck up to the hilt in the side of her leg, blood drooling down her glossy white boots. Trying her best to stay steady on both legs, Mars collapsed down against her lone good leg, dropping hard onto the knees, her hand blindly fumbling for the ground as she found herself racing towards it. She hissed and groaned as she tried to reach for her knife, trying desperately to keep the leg extended and not flex it, all while trying to stay clear of the man.

Sedna let the gun fall to the ground beside the collapsed man who she had subdued moments earlier, leaping over the second man and racing to Mars' side. She watched for the man whose face had become twisted up in pain, watching as he rolled limply to the side, groaning, the last few protesting sounds before he fainted. As she squatted down my Mars, grasping for her shoulder to stop her squirming, she narrowed her eyes at his twisted, still red face, where a pool of a white, goopy substance had pooled over his eyelids and his chin.

"Hold still," Sedna breathed, looking over Mars' side, her hand hovering tenatively over the bloodied grip of the knife. "For the love of Arceus, think of something else."

"No no no—AUGGHH!"

Gritting her teeth, Sedna grasped the knife and pulled it in a swift instant, baring the bloodied steel end. She tossed it aside where it clattered over the concrete floor, turning her attention down to where Mars still moaned in agony. Beneath the gash in Mars' leggings, Sedna's gaze hovered over the thick red slit buried deep in the white surface of her leg. Her hand hovered over the wide, oozing slit, turning her attention up to Mars' torso when realization dawned on her.

Dazed, Mars lifted her head, squinting through the sunlight to see Sedna's deep, dark features in the dim lighting. The same look of realization appeared through her, buried in several different gut-wretching emotions. Her breath picked up, still concealed and concerned from the sudden turn of events. She watched, somewhat removed from the action as Sedna reached down around Mars, reaching beneath her hip and grasping her utility belt.

"Any clue what that gun did?" Mars breathed softly, the color slowly returning to her features.

"Nope."

Sedna had removed a wide plastic manifold from Mars' utility belt, quickly unfolding the two arms on either side of the oblong device. A light came on from beneath the exposed side, casting light on the sets of black rubber teeth beneath the arm. A medical cross on the front lit as the healing capabilties charged up on the device.

As Sedna prepared to set the healing device over Mars' leg, she paused. She slowly raised her head, looking down to the sunlit exit at the end of the long dark subterrainean section of the collapsed fortress. More voices could be heard, more dark figures just outside of the area. As Sedna slowly turned, looking at the dark of the ground where her and Mars were obscured from view, she finally looked at the healing device in her hand, and then at Mars.

"Stay here," she said.

Mars watched as Sedna rose, getting to her feet quickly. A look of fear appeared on her. A wince of pain escaped her as she tried to rise up, seeing where Sedna was going, her hand clamoring for stability beneath her as she supported herself, blindly grasping at gravel and dirt. Her head swam with pain, her gaze darting over each shadow of the dark room, seeing the dark form of Sedna leaving quickly.

"No, Sedna, wait—Where are you going?" asked Mars. Her eyes followed healing device in Sedna's hand as she carried it with her. "Sedna, give me the healing device. You can't go—"

Sedna folded up the flat arms of the healing device, then stooped down to send it scuttling across the dark floor, several long feet from Mars. She turned back to Mars once as she walked away, slowly.

"Let me do this. You'll be safe."

As Sedna got increasingly further from Mars, her eyes slowly widened in desperation. Her leg seized her with pain as she tried to reorient herself on the ground, trying to at least get upright to face Sedna.

"Sedna! No!"

Sedna didn't turn. She looked solemnly ahead, continuing to walk forward, ignoring Mars' pleas as she headed toward her destiny.


	9. Chapter 8

_"Why are you here?"_

* * *

In the darkness of the chamber, Archer felt a throbbing in his head. He sat up just enough to realize his whole body was sore. When he reached for his head, he realized his hands were bound, held tightly by thick, cold handcuffs, the steel of them gleaming in the remaining light of the room.

The room was large, extensively sized but largely bare. Sets of iron doors, slatted and flexible like retracting garage doors, lined the walls to the left and to the right, with a single concrete wall at the far end of the room and a single steel door in the center. The concrete floors were bare and uncomfortable. Archer himself sat on a bed, a thin mattress on spindly metal legs.

A loud rush of sound came through, blustering in from above. Archer turned, seeing a single, barred window to the outside. The night sky was a piercing blue, lit by the moon, wind pummeling through with extreme intensity that built as a mechanical roar came from the outside. A bright light flashed through the room. Archer squinted, seeing that it came from a solitary point of light that was rising outside. The light passed and the dark form of a large aircraft rising into the sky was matted against the blue night sky.

* * *

 _"Why are you here?"_

* * *

Archer shook his head. He was hearing voices. As he shuffled around on the bed, a long set of chains that came from his handcuffs snaked over the mattress, leading to a central point where the chain was attached to the wall.

As he looked down, he saw that the white jacket of his Rocket uniform was gone. He was left in the black undershirt. Though his white pants remained, he saw that his boots were gone with his socks. His bare toes curled, dangling over the bed as he lowered himself, hissing as the cold of the concrete surface touched down.

* * *

 _"Why are you here?"_

* * *

Archer raised his head. Looking out to the window, he could see the distant light of the moon, a glowing sliver.

"Heh, sounds like Ariana..." he muttered.

"Archer, why are you here?"

Hestitating, Archer lowered his gaze from the window. Over his shoulder, Archer slowly turned, his eyes opening wide through the throbbing pain in his head.

Ariana stood at the far end of the room. A haze obscured her from Archer's vision, but as she slowly walked forward she soon turned into as clear and as visible as anything else in the room. The dim light obscured her face, but as she approached the moonlight from above, a look of worry became apparent on her features.

Archer remained aghast. His head throbbed as he processed it all, all of his limbs seizing up in an icy feeling of fear.

"What... What are you..."

The youth of Ariana's features came closer into view, more apparent as she stood over Archer. In the deep black, darkness obscured surface of her eyes, the familiar red glimmer came through. Her lips quivered as she considered what to say. Her searching, unsure eyes raced as she looked over him.

Her uniform looked fresh and starched, a pure white. There wasn't a single wrinkle on it. The obscured Rocket badge over her breast seemed to gleam like it had just been sewn on. Her hair seemed like it had just been done, almost sculpted into the perfect shape with the familiar tufts of hair sticking out, the clips in her hair just barely visible beneath thick sections of red hair.

"My goodness... What did they do to you...?" asked Ariana, her voice quiet.

As Archer sat upright, adjusting his slouch, a hand caressed his face. Looking up, he watched as Ariana held his face and ran her fingertips over his bruised, worn skin. He felt a surge of pain as she traced the edge of a fattened, swollen bruise just beneath his eye. Her touch was delicate, her movements light and graceful as she touched the deep cuts and gashes on the side of his face. Without saying anything, he remained still as she smoothed sections of hair all about the sides of his head.

The bed creaked and rocked softly as Ariana sat down beside him. The heels of her boots clattered against the concrete floor, knocking involuntarily against Archer's bare feet. As she felt something tug at her dress, getting between her and Archer, she reached down and found it, pausing as she raised a section of chain. Her eyes followed the chain from the wall down to Archer's wrists. She swallowed audibly, taking a breath and opening her mouth to speak up.

"Is this an allowed visit?" asked Archer. His voice seemed unused, croaking and dry.

"Something like that," Ariana smiled lightly, only lasting moments before her true emotions came through.

Remaining silent, Archer felt Ariana's arms slip under his, hugging the arm closest to her. A soft, delicate weight rested against his shoulder, and Archer felt the soft, feathery tufts of Ariana's hair brush against his cheek. Taking a deep, pained breath through his nostrils, the smell of shampoo and lotion pulsed through his skull.

"They didn't get you too, did they?" asked Archer.

"No, just you."

Feeling Archer tremble silently, Ariana tugged at his arm, squeezing harder and hugging the arm tighter. Her cheek nudged against his shoulder, nuzzling like a Skitty, careless to the layers of makeup she felt rub away on his shirt.

As Archer blinked away the pain, he felt something itching on his wrists. As he ran his hand over them, he realized they were smooth. He looked down and saw that though he felt the weight of the handcuffs resting in his lap, he saw that they were open, and he could pull his wrists free. A look of dumb confusion came through on his face, and as Ariana's hand grazed his thigh he saw the twinkling of a small piece of wire pinched between her fingers.

A smile spread across his dry lips. As he looked down towards where Ariana was nuzzling against him, he felt her raise her face towards her. Darkness obscured her brow, and as Archer brushed away her bangs with his now free hand, he looked deep into the dark, glossy pits of her eyes. The moonlight twinkled in her eyes, but soon after parted. A layer of tears had broken, Archer realized. As Ariana sniffled, raising her gaze towards him, he could see the tears that coated her cheeks, trails of deep black, runny eyeliner sprinkled over her cheeks.

* * *

The marching of footsteps could be heard outside the door. Muffled voices came through the slits in the door, several of them boisterous and angry sounding.

The sound of several locks clicking beneath the thick steel of the door broke Archer's hypnotized state. He looked down to his naked wrists in a panic and came to a singular conclusion, but as he moved he felt Ariana's hands push down against his lap. Letting out a grunt of protest, he looked to Ariana but felt himself being pushed way. When he lifted his arms to protest, he felt a familiar weight, looking down in surprise as the handcuffs had been latched back on.

When Archer went to say something, he felt a hand cover his mouth, seeing the red nail polish out of the corner of his eyes. He felt Ariana's hot breath against the side of his face, but couldn't turn to face her.

"Be calm," Ariana whispered.

A thundering clanking release came from the other side of the door. Distracted, Archer suddenly felt the warmth of Ariana against him. Beneath the layer of fabric that was the collar of his shirt, Ariana pressed her lips to his neck and kissed gently, letting out a quiet squeak as she did.

The bed clanked audibly as the tension released suddenly from it. Light poured in from the other side of the door as it swung into the room. Blinded, Archer raised his hands in front of his vision and blocked out the light from the outside, jangling the chain he was now attached to. As soon as he lowered the hands blocking out his vision, he watched as two figures, clad in the familiar, black uniforms of before came into the room, walking towards the bed.

Desperately, Archer looked beside him on the bed. Ariana was gone.

The two men grabbed Archer by the shoulders, pulling him off the bed and taking him a few, stumbling steps forward until the chain pulled taught abruptly and stopped their forward movement. Throwing Archer down, he fell to his knees, and dropped forward, kneeling on the floor.

Archer let out a loud grunt, shaking off the brutal, throbbing pain that had appeared in his knees. Shifting his wrists, he could feel them bruising.

From the light of the open door, Archer could feel a long shadow draw over him, encompassing him. As the two grunts held him by the shoulders, Archer slowly lifted his head, looking up at the new figure, squinting through the blinding, unusual light that filled the room.

The figure was tall and feminine. Though she wore the traditional black uniform of everything that Archer had seen of the group, her top sat off-kilter, revealing a bit of midriff beneath the black shirt. Her gray officer's jacket was cut lower, covering the swell of her breasts in the skin-hugging top but just open enough to imply what was so plainly there. Her pants were a deep, military green, lined with and packed with equipment, tucked into her black combat boots. Her messy, wavy blonde hair was tied back above her head.

Squatting down, the officer looked Archer straight in the eyes, pulling close to him and moving beyond the blinding glow of outside the room. Her face turned visible in the moonlight, revealing the thin features and details of her face, her indeterminant icy green eyes, the thin, poised eyebrows and her thin lips, all pierced with a large black mole beside her lips.

"My name is Commander Sylvania. Welcome to J Complex."

Sylvania's fingers flexed in the black fingerless gloves, reaching over to Archer's shoulders and running her fingers over a white smudge. She ran her fingers over the cakey substance, narrowing her eyes at it before shaking it away. When Archer turned to look at it, he saw what she had seen, the remains of Ariana's makeup from when she rested against it.

"Seems like you've been through a lot in getting over here—supposedly twenty years a lot," said Sylvania. "Looks like you could use a bit of... Clean up."

The two grunts holding Archer shoved him to the floor. Though he slid forward, he felt his whole body suddenly whip around as the chain holding his handcuffs went taught, making him fall flat on his back. Groaning, giving a cry of pain, Archer tried his best not to think about the loud pop he had heard in his shoulders, instead focusing on the grunt who held him by his shoulders and the other grunt who wrestled with undoing Archer's handcuffs.

"These two gentleman are going to strip you. Try not to resist or it'll make things hard. We may not have heated water, but this shower will be... Refreshing."

When Archer made a loud groan, he felt the grunt who held his shoulders suddenly grabbed the side of his head and force it to the ground. Archer found himself looking at a drainage grate in the floor, wrinkling his nose at the smell. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched as Sylvania approached again, standing over him.

"When you're done, we'll show you how our prisoners use the restroom."

* * *

Archer let out a weak groan of agony, shuddering and giving way to the urge to shiver. Though her hugged the clothes he wore, he could feel the goosebumps grow to near popping on his skin beneath them. With his hands stuffed in between his folded arms, his naked feet felt like ice in their dampness. All the while, he clutched the white stain on his undershirt, where Ariana's caked on makeup lingered.

Alone in the darkness, Archer stifled another gasp of tortured cold, feeling the evening air come through in another bluster from the open window above. He quickly shook the cold from his face, running his hands several times through his shorn hair as he fought to keep his scalp dry and not from going any colder.

As the silence grew and Archer stifled his tortured shivering, trying to focus on falling asleep, the warmth of a hand slid over his, grasping at it.

Archer leapt from bed and let out a yelp. A hand grabbed him and stifled his shouts, making him be still on the bed, waiting until he had calmed and his breath had returned to normal. After a moment, the hand released from over his mouth. He no longer felt the need to turn or do anything, he already knew who it was.

"How do you keep getting in here?" he breathed.

Without a word, Ariana slipped her hand around towards Archer's, using the same wire she had earlier. After a few inaudible clicks, the metal arms on the handcuffs popped out and released. Archer slid his hands out, rubbing his wrists and then folding them up under his arms.

Ariana took the lengthy set of chains and pulled them away, piling them up on the far side of the bed. Careful as not to make the bed creak, she sat herself up and inched herself around Archer, heading to the far side of the bed and sitting up while Archer lied down. She undid the lapels on her long jacket one at a time, staring solemnly ahead at the opposite side of the room while she removed her jacket.

"I... I don't know..." Ariana said, her voice trembling.

The jacket slid back over her arms. Silently, Ariana took the jacket, draping it over Archer's still shivering torso, pulling the collar up over his shoulders.

Archer grabbed for the collar, wrapping the jacket around him like a blanket. A dead stare came through his eyes. He looked down at Ariana as she worked the white boots of her uniform off, tucking them neatly beneath the bed. Though Ariana said nothing and made no sound, he could see her trembling.

Taking a breath, Ariana slipped a finger into where her long stockings hugged her calf, then slipped the stocking down, popping it over her heel and pulled it free of her foot. She promptly removed the other stocking. Folding them up, she slipped them over Archer's feet, doubling the stocking over to fit like socks.

"What do you mean you don't know? Ari—"

"Archer," Ariana raised her voice, speaking curtly.

As Archer lowered the coat draped over him just enough to see Ariana, he could see the exasperation on her dim features. The blood red iris glowed in the moonlight, staring him down with a firmness.

Ariana's distress faded in moments. Blinking it away, she revealed the worried feelings beneath it, looking solemnly towards the floor. Reaching blindly, she grasped Archer's ankles, rubbing them. She reached for and grasped Archer's socked toes, pressing them between her fingers to feel the cold flesh beneath, squeezing until her own warmth came through.

"They were cruel," said Ariana.

A look of vulnerability permeated Archer's features. Through his exhaustion, the lingering cold and the branding humiliation of the cold shower, he looked to Ariana as she looked more contemplative than anything. He grasped numbly at the coat, pulling it closer to his body.

"I—I should've known better... I knew this would happen eventually... We both knew it... If Giovanni didn't catch us we would certainly wind up in this kind of trouble, captives awaiting torture," said Ariana. In the darkness, her cheeks glistened with teardrops. Squeezing Archer's toes again, she turned to look at Archer, looking incredibly broken. "It's just... Why did it have to be you...? Why couldn't we at least be together...?"

Archer's nostrils flared. He took a deep breath, shaking his head.

"This is too much... I..." Ariana went on. "Why do I have to lose you like this... Why?"

Though what seemed like the obvious came to mind for Archer, he froze. He furrowed his brow, his blank expression slighting towards confusion. When he opened his mouth to speak, nothing came out.

"What do you mean...?" Archer asked. "You... You haven't lost me... I won't... Die...?"

A loud croak of choked-back tears came from Ariana. Placing a hand over her mouth, she forced her eyes shut as tears ruptured forth, pouring from her squeezed eyelids and down her cheeks in hot glistening streams. She visibly shuddered as she choked again, fighting the tears that came out of her in hot spurts.

Ariana opened her eyes for a moment, looking up to see Archer just in the corner of her vision, suddenly very close. His slender arms wrapped around her, pulling her into his embrace. Though she fought her torn emotions, her face twisted with emotional pain, she leaned into Archer, putting a hand on his chest and resting her head beneath his. Making a series of choked, sniveling sounds, Ariana finally broke down and openly wept beside Archer, holding him close, the hands that she had lain upon him grasping in desperation at him as she cried.

A solemn look fell over Archer as he stared ahead, feeling Ariana's shuddering form against him. He gave an icy sigh as he held her close and shut his eyes, enveloped in her warmth. The jacket Ariana had draped over him slid down and draped over both him and Ariana, wrapping them in that warmth.

After several long, bleak moments, Ariana's shuddering and tearful cries of distress subsided, quieting down and leaving the two of them in the embrace. Ariana rested alongside Archer, nudging him with her head.

"You're still cold," Ariana said, her voice faint.

Torn from his train of thoughts, Archer shook off the thought. He looked down at Ariana, rubbing just beneath her shoulder blades, the expanse of back beneath the thin black undershirt. He didn't reply or say anything, instead burying his nose in her hair.

"I'm serious," said Ariana. "I can feel you, don't lie."

"I didn't lie. I didn't say anything," said Archer. His distressed outlook seemed to calm at the response, something seeming homely about it.

"You were going to ignore the question. There's no point in being tough around me, surely you know that. Don't you dare insinuate that you were going to play things off like you're fine. You darn well better tell me when something is distressing you, especially tonight."

A slight smile appeared on Archer's features. "You've done enough for me already."

Ariana raised her head at this, looking indignant. "You better stop thinking ridiculous things like that. You're stuck with me for the rest of tonight."

"What a nightmarish prospect."

"Darling, I will pin you down and make sure that you get some rest, mark my words."


	10. Chapter 9

_"Gimme a bullet to bite on, something to chew. Gimme a bullet to bite on, and I'll make believe—I'll make believe it's you."_

 _—Unknown_

* * *

Two Plasma grunts flanked Commander Sedna as she stepped out into the light of the clearing. With both of their plastic-nosed guns aimed directly at her chest, just in view of her peripherals, she walked with her hands on her head.

The rubble-covered floor of the Rocket Compound disappeared beneath Sedna's boots as she walked out onto the cracked, dry earth, surrounded by tall, rocky sides that led up to the deep green Ilex Forest. Looking back, she could see the darkness of the final floor she had been in, overshadowed by the tall mess of collapsed walls and floors.

A sharp kick to her leg brought Sedna down abruptly. She collapsed down onto her knees hard, kneeling in the dirt, bringing her head around in a haze. As she struggled to adjust herself, she looked up, gazing along the massive hillsides that surrounded her like a colosseum, a large ampitheatre-like space with rows and rows of Team Plasma grunts standing on the various levels of rocky hillside, all armed with similar weapons and covered with white, featureless masks. The sunlight had pushed through the clouds, parting them wide and casting blinding rays of sunshine down on the ground towards Sedna.

"Welcome Commander," a loud voice boomed, echoing through the open space. "It seems you have traversed alone in this endeavor to meet your fate, and you have let your companion die."

Squinting through the blinding sun, Sedna looked up towards the very center of all the rows of grunts were several had parted, flanked by lieutenants, seeing the source of the booming voice. It was a general, a man, much older as his worn features and white hair suggested, wearing a breathing mask over his mouth.

"It seems you have carried on the mission, however, and that you must have vital information."

The two grunts that had flanked her split, one standing over her while another let his weapon slip behind him, slung behind his back as he kneeled. He patted down the inside of Sedna's coat, feeling her body down in a incoherent, rough manner as he searched for anything. He opened every pouch on her utility belt, then patted down her coat. Feeling something, he opened up the pocket on her labcoat, removing a small white object—a thumbdrive.

The grunt got to his feet, holding his arm high and showing the thumbdrive for all to see.

As a cheer went up around the many rows of grunts, Sedna grimaced, narrowing her eyes in face of the humiliation and looking up to the general at the center of the rows. She wrinkled her nose as he looked on the thumbdrive briefly and expressionlessly, then looking down to her.

"The data on the Time Beast expeditions, the full experiments... You have satisfied our mission so easily, Commander."

Looking up to the two grunts that stood over her, Sedna heard the crackling radio chatter beneath both of their masks, audible and distant as several orders came through. She looked up to the lieutenants flanking the general, watching as they gave orders into their radios.

"And now Commander, it seems you are of little value to us any longer. It seems that there is nothing left now but to watch you die."

* * *

Deep in the underground chambers of the Rocket Fortress, Mars let out a loud, pained grunt as she clawed at the ground, dragging her body through the gravel several inches. Her injured leg jostled atop her as she moved, making her wince with insatiable pain. She took a torn, wadded up section of her leggings and pressed it deep into the cut, soaking up the blood that had oozed out onto her leg, all while, reaching out again and dragging herself through the gravel again.

Her hand landed on something smooth and plastic, clean and familiar. Grasping it, Mars felt the form of the healing device Sedna had tossed across the underground space. She tossed aside the wadded cloth, instead putting the healing device into her blood-stained hand, opening the arms on it carefully and charging up the healing cells inside. The rubber teeth sank into the torn, bloodied material of her leggings and pressed the lit center to the deep gash.

The hissing sound of fusing flesh eminated from the injured leg. Mars gave quiet gasps, letting the healing process take over.

An abrupt beep came from the healing device, followed by the sound of the healing cells powering off. The light shut off from beneath it and Mars carefully removed the device, folding up the arms. She slipped the device into the brim of her boot. Carefully, she flexed her leg, feeling that all the muscle had healed together and didn't cause any pain.

Grasping at a column just behind her, Mars gave a few panting breaths of fear as she slowly lifted herself up into a sitting position, then carefully worked both her legs beneath her. She pushed herself off the ground, extending both of her legs to their full, lanky length. She eased her weight onto both legs carefully then took a few tenative steps. There wasn't any feeling of pain. Flexing her leg, reaching back and grabbing the toe of her boot, popping her knee and then kicking forward, she breathed a sigh of relief and newfound confidence.

In a single, swift move, Mars popped the Pokeball from her utility belt and gripped it in her hand. Looking down at the gleaming shell in the dim light, Mars lifted her gaze towards the sunlit end of the expansive underground, looking to where she saw the lone figure of Sedna standing.

Mars broke into a sprint.

* * *

The two grunts that stood over Sedna approached, charging up their plastic-nosed guns and approaching Sedna. They each grabbed an arm, dragging her on her knees towards the front of the amphitheater-like space.

Sedna gave a dull look, staring ahead at the rock face ahead and ignoring the jeers of the crowd around her. As her legs dragged behind her, Sedna felt her boots catch on rocks and bump on the dirt of the ground. When they reached the closest end of the space to the general, Sedna felt the grip on her arms release and drop her to her knees once again. She fell over, flat on her face, the thick white armor plate over her torso giving a plastic like clatter on the rock as she fell. She raised herself slowly, pulling herself onto her hands and knees.

Overhead where the general presided over the coming execution, his jacket swaying in the breeze, his breathing audible through his mask, he held a hand out and stopped the two grunts who stood beside Sedna.

A lieutenant had brought himself down to the bottom of the pit-like space, crossing the dirt floor a few striding steps before calling over one of the grunts. The other was left alone with Sedna, standing beside her and waiting.

"That's a cute gun you've got there," Sedna said. She gave a look to the grunt still holding her, giving a coy look.

The grunt gave Sedna a look, ignoring the taunt. He stood with the gun poised beneath his arm, at attention for the general.

"Did they train you on toy ray guns? The ones with sound effects?"

A sharp, swift fist came from the far right of Sedna's vision, delivering a hard smack to the side of her head. Sedna flopped over like a ragdoll, having done absolutely nothing to brace for the impact. Her lip cracked and oozed blood over the corner of her mouth and chin, mixing with the coarse dirt beneath her head. Laying on her side, draped in her labcoat, Sedna groaned in pain, looking up to the deliverer of the punch.

The second grunt, the grunt who had left her side to go speak with the lieutenant had returned without any warning. With the gun in one hand and a bloody, naked fist in the other, the grunt gave a sneering smile, kicking her in the shin hard.

"I'd love to end you right here with my 'little ray gun'," the grunt said. "Now get up. The general likes to see the fear in his prisoner's eyes before the skull melts."

"Make me," Sedna spat, drooling blood onto the ground.

The sneer on the grunt's face immediately disappeared, replaced with a teeth-gritting, driving anger. He took a few steps, slinging the gun over his back as he came over and reached down, grabbing Sedna's arm and lifting her to her feet.

Sedna was ready. As soon as she felt her leg reorient and fall beneath her, she pushed off and ran into the grunt. She met with a strong, stopping arm, hearing him shout loudly into her ear. She then raced around the arm, feeling him stop at her and grab her arm. It gave her enough time to run behind him and get a hand towards the gun, grabbing the cocking arm and tugging back, ejecting the battery of the plastic-nosed gun down into the dirt.

"Oh no you don't, lady," said the grunt as she tugged at her arm, pulling her back around.

Sedna got in a mean swing with her leg, kicking into his ankle, getting a brutalized cry from him. In return, the grunt suddenly pulled her around with all his force and held both her arms. As Sedna wriggled in her arms and he squeezed hard, his loud, booming voice shouting taunts at her, Sedna leaped up and put his nose between her teeth, clamping down and pulling back sharply, feeling the satisfying tear of flesh.

A hand released from Sedna's arm, immediately grabbing at her face, pushing it away. She felt his fingers reaching for her brow, ready to push in on her eye, when she rammed her fist into his stomach in two quick successions. Standing on two feet, she looked down on the subdued grunt who had fallen back, stepping around his writhing limbs and moving around him. Sedna panted, feeling the color return to her features, flexing her muscles as she prepared for more.

Through the hundreds of shouts and jeers that came through the 'audience' of grunts, echoing through the dirt space, Sedna heard the distinct charging of a weapon. She looked over, seeing the grunt pulling back several times on his weapon, trying to charge it. Without time or thought, Sedna ducked down, pulling the subdued grunt into a headlock and lifting him up sharply. When he grabbed at Sedna's arm, dazed from the wrestling match earlier, Sedna held his neck tighter, choking him and starving him of oxygen.

The grunt raised his weapon, having started the charging of the weapon and aiming it at her. The nose of the weapon pulsed, charging. He sturdied his features and his stance, unwavering even though Sedna had the subdued grunt between herself and the weapon.

Beneath the convulsing, choking body of the grunt, limp and hanging from Sedna's arms like the dead weight he was, Sedna paused to consider her options. Through the corner of her eye, she saw the lieutenants that flanked the general preparing orders and communicating amongst themselves, all of the grunts in the ampitheater-like space listening attentively to their radioes, including the grunt on the ground with her who had his weapon pointed at her and the grunt. An earpiece, leading to the radio on the uniform of the grunt Sedna carried, skewed but still largely in his ear, buzzed with the orders going to all the other grunts. He spat and choked, drooling blood onto Sedna's arm.

"No... Please..." the grunt begged. "They can't kill me... They will! Lady, you don't know what those weapons are like... It's the most painful death I can think of..."

True to his word, Sedna watched the grunt just several feet in front of her and the grunt in her arms listen to his order carefully, carefully aiming the weapon at the grunt and Sedna. Her eyes followed the line of sight from the nose of the gun to where the shot would land, dead center in the grunt's chest.

Sedna switched arms, imagining and keeping track of the mere seconds she had left. With one arm locked around the grunt's arm, maintaining the headlock, Sedna reached down and around to her utility belt. The one arm wrapped around him locked even tighter, choking him hard as she felt him squirm and fight the headlock, trying to get away. While she fought him off, she reached down to the slots where her Pokeballs were locked in, grasping numbly for the right one.

"No... No! Please! Mercy!" the grunt wailed, watching his former comrade take aim.

A dull thud came from the nose of the grunt's gun, firing directly at the chest of the grunt Sedna held. A violent, blinding scream came from the grunt as his chest pulsed and thudded as the invisible shot landed.

Holding onto the writhing grunt proved to be more than Sedna expected, but she held on, reaching down and finally getting her Pokeball. She pressed the button on the front, letting it fall behind her. Feeling the grunt's frothing mouth drool onto her arm as he screamed, Sedna let the grunt fall to the ground and stumbled back, clearing herself of the grunt.

The grunt screamed on the floor, losing any semblance of decorum. He clutched his chest in desperation as it pulsed and throbbed. All at once, the structure of his chest seemed to cave in on the right side, as if he had lost all of his ribs. A dull crack came from his chest and he screamed even louder, clawing at dirt.

Sedna was engrossed in the horrifying ordeal of the grunt, but her attention turned up to the grunt with the weapon as he pulled again on the side of the gun, cocking it. The light in the nose of the weapon pulsed, charging. As he took aim, a massive eruption of light and sound came from behind Sedna. She ducked, hearing the gun fire and then miss.

A large, bright red image emerged from the open Pokeball that lay in the dirt. Magneton emerged from the flashing lights, kicking up a swirl of dirt as it rose slowly, levitating off the ground. A low magnetic hum pulsed from the center of its three cores, the wide eyes searching the battlefield as it gained a sense of its environment.

Gasping and smiling, Sedna rested in the dirt for a few short moments, then scrambled across the dirt beneath Magneton, grabbing its Pokeball and holstering it. She got to her feet carefully, standing tall beside Magneton, her lab coat whipping in the wind behind her.

Unfazed, the grunt pulled the handle on the side of the gun again, cocking it and charging it. Taking aim, he pointed the end of the weapon towards Sedna's chest and fired. When the nose of the gun pulsed it stayed brightly lit, flickering and glowing carefully. The field in front of the gun warped, pulsing and changing until a bright surge of energy appeared, the bolt of energy fired from the gun appearing and hanging in midair like a bolt of lightning. The grunt froze, looking up in fear at Magneton's glowing, spinning magnets on the corners of its body, responsible for the frozen bolt of energy.

The bolt of energy suddenly flung back, throwing itself directly into the gun. Electrical arcs flashed and rippled all around the gun and the grunt. An explosion of electrical energy erupted around the grunt and sent him flying backwards, tumbling over the ground before he collapsed and slid to the far end of the space.

"Magneton!" Sedna shouted. "Use Thunder Ball!"

" _Maaaagnneeeee!_ "

Sedna looked up to the grunts that lined the rows of the dirt cliffs surrounding them. All of them cocked their weapons, the sound of charging echoing throughout the space. Lieutenants shouted orders to their divisions, unintelligible but echoing all throughout the space.

The sky darkened. A bright surge of energy rippled and surrounded Magneton's body, making its body glow bright. The magnets at the points of his body spun rapidly, glowing a bright white as the electrical field surrounding the whole space was harnessed, turning into a bright, pulsing field. Only the dark outline of Magneton could be seen as the electricity gathered in him, then erupted.

Waves of electrical energy shot out from Magneton in large arcs, launching into the rows of grunts. Many of the grunts leapt to the side or ducked down as the waves flashed and crackled, dissipating before they crashed into them. Bright flashing aftershocks crackled around them, fizzling around their weapons and crackling audibly. All around, shouts of protest and confusion rippled through them. They tried firing their weapons but couldn't, swapping battery packs quickly or throwing the guns down in frustration.

The hum that emanated from Magneton built to a roar. It lowered carefully, swaying inches above the ground as it recovered from such a blast. Reeling from exhaustion, the roaring hum petered out and sounded like a whining metal hinge as it recovered momentarily.

Careful, looking at the remaining crackles of electricity that sparked over Magneton's body, Sedna reached out and pressed her hand to the cool metal surface of its lowermost orb body, breathing a sigh of relief. She looked to the large glassy eye beside her hand and smiled as it darted up to her, a trill coming from deep within the metal body. Looking up as the sky brightened once again, Sedna looked up to the general, still presiding over the open space but with less of his plans intact.

Across the ground, where the grunt rested on his side, knocked aside from Magneton's deflected blast, the dirt trail that had been carved into the ground began with a single, silvery point; Sedna's thumbdrive. When Sedna reached down for the thumbdrive, she hesitated, watching it twitch and throb in the dirt, before suddenly lifting several feet off the ground. She looked to the side to see Magneton, one of its spinning magnets glowing as it levitated the thumbdrive in front of Sedna. She grasped it, breathing a sigh of relief, grinning deliriously.

"You have proven to be more resilient than first blush, Commander. You'd be pleased to know we must defer to more desperate measures."

Sedna looked up the presiding general, looking confused at the notion. As she considered it all, she thought for a moment that she could see a brief smile beneath the mask that covered his mouth, hearing a loud wheeze come from it.

High in the air, Sedna heard what sounded like a blast of air, a loud rush of wind. Turning back, feeling the wind whip through her hair and brush into her forehead, she looked up to the sky, no longer hearing the rush of wind. She narrowed her eyes through the bright sunshine, seeing a dark object falling out of the sky.

A gleam of metal armor flashed as the dark figure descended—a man. A flash of light came from beneath him, the same rush of wind coming from him as he slowed his descent. All around, the grunts shouted with raucous pleasure, watching him fall closer and closer to the center of the open dirt space, now turned arena. The bright flash of light came again, slowing his descent to where he gently hovered and crested a tall rock formation towards the inside of the space, touching down on two feet and landing.

"Commander, I present you with The Third Imperator."

The Imperator shook off several thick straps from over the front of his chest, letting the thick, heavy jetpack fall from his back and land on the rock with a resounding clang. A silver mask covered his whole face, just as featureless as all the other white masks that the other grunts wore. Plates of beaten metal adorned him, ornate with deep purple plating and silver inlays, built into the leather of his uniform. His heavily plated legs and boots clanked on the rock as he stepped forward, facing Sedna. He pressed in on a section on the side of his helmet, triggering a bright red point of light beneath the silver surface on the left side of his mask, pointed directly at Sedna.

The Imperator put out both arms fists out. With two Pokeballs gripped in his fist, he waited a moment, triggering two metal arms built into his plated gauntlets to launch two more Pokeballs. With two already in the air, he launched two more, sending four Pokemon into the battlefield.

In several bright, earth-shattering explosions of light, four Pokemon materialized. Rising from the bright flashes of light and the swirling dust, the heads of four Scolipede appeared, the tiny red legs grasping rapidly at the air as they hissed loud and shrill.

Taking a few steps back, the Third Imperator planted a foot directly in the center of his jetpack. He pressed in, triggering the pressure plate, then put his second foot on it. The steel plates on the surface hissed, releasing from their locked position and reaching out like legs. The jetpack—now platform—rose from the rocky surface on spindly, spider-like legs, crawling over the rocky surface and climbing high, an arm beneath the platform the Imperator stood on raised him high. He unfurled a cape from his pack, taking the silver trim at the edge of the cape and latching it to the plates around his collarbone, draping the black cape over his shoulder.

A tall antenna sprouted from the side of his helmet, sparking and lighting the tip. All at once, the Scolipede that had gathered around the base of the rock formation came to attention. Now under his control. He turned, focusing the red eye on his mask towards Sedna, raising an arm lit with various sensors from beneath the cape, sending forth the Scolipede that raced out from beneath the rock.

Sedna took a step back, watching the hundreds of skittering legs as the Scolipede raced towards her, clamoring over one another in a desperate bid to reach her. Their bodies snaked over the ground like they were gliding, all chittering with vengeful threats, a set of glowing red eyes beneath their red hoods, sets of pincers snapping with venom dripping from them. Turning to Magneton, who hovered vengefully, charging the magnets at the corners of its body, Sedna took a few steps towards Magneton and headed past it quickly, starting to run, kicking up dirt as she ran across. Through the dirt clouds behind her she could only hear the Scolipede as they hissed, but watched as Magneton stood still, bobbing softly as it hovered and beared down on the foursome of Pokemon.

Another tall rock formation jutted from the ground, several feet away from the one the Third Imperator had arrived on. Sedna clawed at the rock, leaping up and lifting herself from the ground, pulling her legs up and finding foothold as she quickly scaled the rock. Looking beside her, several feet away, a few of the Scolipede had leapt onto Magneton, trying scale its slippery body with their hundreds of legs, hissing and snapping and trying to get to it. Magneton bobbed, shuddering in air, the smooth surface of its body crackling brightly with electricity as deterrent.

Sedna levied herself over the edge of the rock, pulling her feet beneath her and raising herself high. She let her white lab coat fall behind her, fluttering down behind the rock. Flexing the material of her uniform, brushing dirt from the thick white breastplate she wore, she reached to her utility belt, grasping a Pokeball and looking down towards the unfolding scene, watching as the Third Imperator glided across the ground on his crawling platform, raising an arm and commanding the various Scolipede under his control as they assaulted Magneton. The Imperator turned, giving her a blank, expressionless look as she stood tall, wielding her second Pokeball.

A loud, shuddering metallic groan came from Magneton. The leaping, screeching Scolipede pack knocked the massive metal-bodied Pokemon with ease, sending it reeling back a few feet before leaping again at him. The wide porthole eyes darted each which way, looking incredibly tired. Magneton's movements turned more sluggish with each pass, the groans it emitted becoming more faint.

Sedna threw the Pokeball, sending it whizzing through the air. It bounced on the ground, exploding in mid-air and flashing brightly. When the flash subsided, Sableye appeared, falling to the ground and catching himself on his spindly legs, taking a few steps forward. A set of geodesic eyes gleamed in the sunlight, looking over the battlefield.

Two of the Scolipede gave shrill screeches, breaking off from the pack and leaving the other Scolipede to finish Magneton, racing towards where Sableye had appeared. Their screams gave Sableye little time to think, catching his attention immediately as he turned his head and stared them down. As they clamored within feet of him, he leaped up on his sprung legs, arcing back in-air towards a set of small rocks and landing on all fours.

A small hiss came from Sableye's mouthless face. A set of tiny nostrils flared beneath his protruding gem eyes as he sensed his enemy. Seeing that the Scolipede continued to advance, he reared up on his hind legs and took a step back. With his fist raised high, he leaped down from the rock, delivering a crunching punch to the armored head of the Scolipede on his left. He shut out the loud, ensuing screech, pulling out a pulpy fist and rearing up. He had just enough time to see the second Scolipede from the right leap at him, pincers splayed, forcing Sableeye to fall back and hit the ground. He recovered as soon as he could, dodging a snap from the lurching right Scolipede, but looked down in horror as the Scolipede he had punched had shaken off the blow and sunk its pincers deep into his foot.

Though Sableye maintained his disciplined movements, kicking his other leg up and turning his whole body so that he faced the ground, he kicked his injured leg into the Scolipede's face. He made it an inch towards the face before he realized through agonizing pain that the pincer would not let go. He pulled forward and wriggled, trying to push himself off the ground as he saw the second Scolipede racing towards him.

In mere seconds, Sableye had managed to kick himself loose from Scolipede's talons, launching himself free and out onto the ground, where he was able to scamper on all fours towards the tall rock formation that the Third Imperator had landed on. He leapt up and caught the side of the rock face, lifting himself up a foot above the ground on the vertical face and kicking to find a foothold. His injured foot had turned numb. Looking down, he saw that his foot had been severely mangled, the purple skin he normally had turning pale and crawling up his leg, poisoning the leg. Just a foot below, the Scolipede gathered at the base and snapped. He leaped up, using his one leg to hobble up along the side of the rock as he climbed just barely higher, avoiding the Scolipede as they leaped up onto their hind legs.

Sedna watched in horror from across the space, standing atop an opposite rock. Transfixed on Sableye's plight, watching him dangle from the rock as he tried to kick his useless leg, she looked in desperation for options. She put a hand over her chest, looking down and realizing she had been panting.

A loud metal scraping broke her concentration. Looking over to the other side of the dirt space, looking for the source of the sound, Sedna saw Magneton as it floated uselessly across the battlefield. The loud scraping came again, coupled with a metallic groan as Magneton's eyes slowly shut. Loose bolts of electrical energy crackled over its surface in a final effort. The two Scolipede, one that had been violently clawing at a shutting eye and another who had managed to cut a gash into the steel surface, oozing with poison into the surface of one of Magneton's orb, leaped away quickly. The surrounding magnetic field warped and destabilized, a loud machine-like hum wavering and growing before abruptly cutting out. Magneton collapsed, the magnets suspended around it falling to the ground and the three cores splitting and falling with a gigantic crash into the earth. A cheer went up around the space as grunts applauded the defeat, the dust settling on Magneton's remains.

Looking back in desperation, Sedna spotted Sableye. She blindly reached for her last Pokeball, putting a hand over her mouth and calling out to him.

" _Sableye!_ " Sedna shouted. "Use ranged attacks! Use—Aaauughh!"

The rock under her shuddered. Sedna fell back, stumbling back over the rocky surface and landing a foot lower on the formation. Her whole frame winced from the impact, her limbs sore and unsure as she quickly attempted to pull herself up. A long shadow drew over her as she tried to look up. Squinting, she saw the Third Imperator standing over her, standing on the spider-like platform.

The spindly steel legs of the platform raised mechanically, pulling its legs from the rock it had sank into and crawling down the top of the rock. The Third Imperator seemed to glide down over the rock towards Sedna like an angel of death.

Sedna fought valiantly to get herself up. Her whole body, sore from contact, rose carefully and contorted painfully to support her damaged state. Through gritted teeth she groaned loudly, and through squinting eyes Sedna gave a careful glance over to the battlefield, towards the dirt space overshadowed by a tall rock. Sableye had fallen into the pit of Scolipede, hissing and screaming as the two Scolipede attacked him from both sides, tearing into him with their pincers. The other two Scolipede who had finished Magneton raced to join the Scolipede in tearing apart Sableye, jumping into the fray and tearing at his limbs. All Sedna could see of Sableye was the twitching, grasping arm that clawed at the dirt and tried to pull himself away, moments before it was pulled into the feeding frenzy.

Another powerful shudder came from the rock as the spider-like platform sank its legs into the rock. Jolting Sedna to attention, she could see that the Imperator was just mere feet away from her, taking all the time he could to reach her. A loud metal clang came from the platform as a tall rod suddenly protruded from a panel. Reaching down to it, the Imperator pulled out a gleaming sword, holding it high in the sunlight. Another cheer roared through the rows of grunts.

Sedna couldn't quite bring herself up, still sore from the landing, and instead chose to grasp at the rocks and pull herself back, inching away from the closing Imperator. As she did, turning down to get a better grip, she saw that the Pokeball that had been in her hands moments earlier had fallen down towards the ground, not releasing the Pokemon held inside and instead was resting against the rocks. It didn't stop her; she pressed on, hoisting herself over another stretch of rock.

A metal leg came down hard between her legs. It narrowly missed her flesh, sinking down through the material of her uniform pants. Sedna tried to pull away and couldn't, feeling her leg trapped. She kicked hard, feeling it tear slightly, but stopped when she looked up to the Imperator, watching as he raised his sword high. A roar went up through the crowds as he placed a second hand on the hilt, centering the blade between both his hands, preparing to deliver the final blow, and—

 _ **THOOM!**_

A bright blast of energy shot across the battlefield, landing squarely in the center of the Third Imperator's chest. It knocked him from the platform, sending him tumbling off the rock formation and down towards the ground where he landed with a dull thud.

Roars of outrage stirred Sedna from stupor her as she braced for the blow to end her life. When she looked up, seeing a clear sky with the Imperator nowhere to be seen, she raised herself carefully. The platform he had been standing on had been knocked to the ground, far below the rock where Sedna was. The leg where the platform had pinned her was still sunk into her pants and the rock. She tore her pants from the leg victoriously, sitting herself fully upright and gasping for air.

Sedna levied herself around, turning towards the source of the blast, narrowing her eyes through the blinding sunlight.

Just outside the shadow of the chasm deep beneath the collapsed Rocket Fortress, Purugly stood tall. She bellowed, her gargantuan body shuddering as a thundering roar echoed off the rocks and ran through the many rows of grunts. A tiny pair of golden eyes set beneath a thick brow gleamed with rage, the last remnants of the Hyper Beam sparking from her.

Amongst the swirling dirt that surrounded Purugly, kicked up in the massive draw of energy from the blast, Mars stepped out into the light. Her legs moved with ease, completely healed without any trace of scarring or intensive damage—the torn opening in her leggings revealed nothing but pure white skin. She raised an arm, shielding herself from the sun and dirt.

A roar went up through the gathered grunts, chatting incredulously among themselves as they saw Mars enter. By their shouts and catcalls, it seemed as though they knew Mars. Though she continued to enter the battlefield, bringing Purugly close behind her, she was visibly confused at the raucous sound.

Sedna waved, a faint smile appearing on her as she made eye contact with Mars. As she saw Mars pick up the pace and head into a sprint, Purugly bounding behind her, she saw in the corner of her vision a flurry of motion. The pack of four Scolipede had picked up and left her drooling, unconscious Sableye be, scrambling around the set of rocks and racing towards the unsuspecting Mars. She got to her feet, rising and standing high above the rocks in a desperate bid for Mars' attention. Heading quickly to the edge, Sedna turned herself and brought herself down, kicking her legs over the edge and grasping the rocky edge. As she tried desperately to find a foothold to help levy herself down, she gave a look towards the advancing Scolipede, seeing them close on Mars and Purugly, and quickly made her choice. She let go, sending herself hurtling towards the rocky ground.

A loud crack rang out as Sedna landed. Beyond soreness, Sedna didn't feel any immediate pain or the shattering sensation of bones breaking. As she raised herself carefully, she reached down and felt for her chest where the sound had come from. The pure white section of armor that covered her chest, the breastplate, had cracked. Breathing soundly, dazed from the fall, Sedna raised her head and saw the Scolipede round the corner.

Mars had heard the large crack. Just as she stopped, pausing to see if Sedna was okay, the dense pack of Scolipede rounded the corner of the tall rock formation, leaping and hissing over one another in a desperate, mindless bid to reach her and Purugly. Mars stopped herself from moving forward, holding a hand out to Purugly to hold her back from advancing. Beside her, in the thick cloud of dust that had kicked up from Purugly's bounding steps, Purugly planted her trunk-like legs into the ground and stood firm, a low growl emitting from deep within her cavernous chest.

"Purugly," Mars breathed. She reached around to her utility belt and pulled out another Pokeball. "Charge up your Hyper Beam. Get ready."

Mars hucked a Pokeball, sending it high into the air where it flashed and released Golbat. A loud screech proudly came from Golbat as she lowered herself carefully, flapping a pair of leathery wings desperately to keep herself aloft. Her incredibly large mouth opened wide, baring a set of thin, tiny silver fangs, gleaming and flashing in the sunlight beneath a pair of warped, white eyes.

"Supersonic, Golbat!" Mars shouted. She took a few steps back, hearing the hissing and skittering of Scolipede as they got with in feet of her.

Descending from the heights of mid-air, Golbat swung low, extending her wings wide as she glided into the hissing mass of Scolipede. She screeched loudly, echoing and warping her voice with otherworldly force. Loud, shrill screams came in cacophonous disarray from the snaking masses of Scolipede. As Golbat came in for a second pass, a Scolipede leapt up and snapped at her, forcing Golbat to pull up sharply.

A loud shredding came from beneath Sedna's uniform. She gritted her teeth, pulling again sharply as she gained a better handhold beneath the cracked plate. She freed it from her lower mid-section, tossing aside the plate. A tattered section remained from her back, and double wrapping it around her fist she pulled tightly, tearing it away cleanly. Her undershirt, warped and torn away, still clung to her upper body, wrapping her breasts, her arms and her shoulders. Her belly was naked and exposed, a clean section of uninjured, glistening ebony skin, toned with muscle.

Panting, Sedna reached down to the ground, kicking aside the destroyed armor and grabbing the Pokeball that had been knocked free of her hand earlier, picking it up from beneath the shadow of the rock. Looking up to where Mars was, watching where her Golbat struggled to feed off the Scolipede, Sedna grasped her Pokeball, getting to her feet.

Across the battlefield, opposite where Mars was struggling, Sedna turned her gaze towards the far end of the battlefield. The Third Imperator had gotten to his feet, standing at the far edge beneath a cliff wall lined with grunts. She watched, almost hypnotized as he moved slow and stiff, armor battered and gleaming in the sun.

Mars backpedaled quickly. She moved around the far side of the rock, diverting at least two of the Scolipede towards her and away from Purugly as she charged. Several feet ahead, as Golbat defended Purugly from attacks, sweeping down and blitzing towards the Scolipede at full speed in a screeching torrent, Purugly was close to full power, fur rippling as she continued to draw energy.

As she watched the footsteps of her boots and just behind her, arms out to the side to maintain her balance and keep her from tipping on the rocky surface, Mars looked up suddenly to see one of the Scolipede leap at her, his head darting down and shooting towards her legs. She pulled back just in time, leaping back a few steps. Gasping in surprise, an icy feeling of fear creeping through her stomach, Mars watched as another Scolipede leapt at her. This time it sent her stumbling back, tripping over a rock and falling back hard. She batted away the cloud of dust that kicked up around her as she fell, trying to get up quickly. As she turned to the side she met with a faceful of pincers, hissing and snapping as the furious, glowing orange eyes beared down on her.

Mere seconds from certain disfigurement and death, Mars let out a shrill gasp as Golbat suddenly swooped down, driving her whole body at full force into the Scolipede. Mars watched, wide-eyed and choking as the two Scolipede flew through the air, flung in twisting, awkward positions as they slammed at full speed into a rock face, a loud crack coming from their exoskeletons. In turn, Golbat stumbled a few feet ahead, losing her gliding trajectory and crashing, flopping and rolling through the dirt like a dismembered tire. When the dirt had cleared, only a few awkward wings sticking out indicated that Golbat was still in one piece, buried in a slump of impacted dirt from the high-speed crash. The leathery purple skin flapped silently in the wind, still and stuck upright as she rested unconscious.

Mars grasped the Pokeball from her utility belt belonging to Golbat, bringing herself onto her hands and knees to get up. She stopped short, feeling her vision swim and an incredible, bursting pain appear in her stomach. She grasped at it dully, feeling it beneath the uniform as it convulsed. Making a choking sound, Mars launched herself forward from the force of her stomach and threw up on the ground, dumping the contents of her stomach out of her mouth.

" _ **URRRUUUUUGGGGGGHHHH!**_ "

Purugly unleashed. A pure white column of energy fired from deep within Purugly's immense body, blasting through the advancing Scolipede and knocking them back. The blast surged through to the far end of the battlefield, crashing through the rows of rock that the grunts stood atop as several of them dived out of the way.

Sedna had ducked just in time, missing the thick column of blasted energy as it shot over her. As she went hurtling towards the ground, she clicked the release on her Pokeball, letting it bounce and roll away in the moments before she collided. When she hit, all the wind got knocked out of her, the surging column of energy blasting loudly overhead and filling her senses. Fighting her urge to stay down, Sedna reached back with a sore arm to her utility belt, grasping at an empty Pokeball.

A bright explosion of light erupted from the Pokeball, sending it rolling from the floor. A surging form of energy lifted high into the air, moments before morphing into Butterfree. Fluttering his wings rapidly and lightly, Butterfree soared into the air, squealing his battle cry as he soared over the battlefield.

The beam of energy dissipated, giving Sedna the chance to stand up. Once on two feet, standing strong, Sedna gave a raggedy breath of exhaustion, clutching her stomach as she fought to keep her energy up. She gave an exhausted look to the squirming Scolipede as they snaked on their backs, visibly sore from the Hyper Beam.

"Butterfree..." Sedna breathed. "Use Stun Spore, _now..._ "

Butterfree swooped down to the ground, fluttering his wings with ease before lifting himself high. His billowing white wings stretched wide, the fat swollen abdomen at the end of his body pulsing and swelling, suddenly squeezing and belching out a yellow haze of spores, leaving the fur-covered orifices. The haze of spores descended, mixing with the rustled dust and dirt,coating the Scolipede. They winced, their exoskeleton plates locking up under the effects of the spores, unable to move or do anything.

As Butterfree moved through the air, effectively coating the Scolipede, Sedna took a few stiff steps towards the underbelly of the tall rock opposite the one she had been on moments earlier. Down in the shadows, resting in a pool of poison and blood, Sableye rested unconscious. Thick sections of scaly skin had been torn into, oozing with dried, maroon-colored blood. His geodesic eyes had been deeply scratched, deep gashes carved in around them. His arms and legs were pulled into unusual contorted positions. Sedna could not assess whether he was dead or alive. Solemnly, she took the empty Pokeball in her hand and captured Sableye.

The clanking footsteps of the Third Imperator appeared behind Sedna, distant and muted, plodding through the dirt quickly. A roar rose throughout the gathered grunts as he closed on her, still distant and several feet off, getting closer and closer as she kept her at bay in the shadow of the tall rocks. He twirled the gleaming sword expertly, a rush of wind surrounding it as he prepared to strike.

Sedna took a few backpedaling steps, her eyes locked on the ominous mask of the Imperator as he moved in a slow arc, keeping close to Sedna and never giving her the advantage of distance. She reached out behind her, feeling for anything in the way as she kept her focus on her.

A blast of pink, psychic energy erupted from the other side of the rocks, pummeling straight into the dirt floor and exploding beside the Imperator's boot. The Imperator looked to the side, to the dark side of the rock he was following Sedna around, watching as Purugly stalked him like prey, hunched low and crawling forward with her tail high in the air. A low growl escaped her as she hesitated for a moment, her golden eyes locked on him, then opening her maw and letting out an eruption of psychic energy, making the Imperator leap and try and dodge. The blast caught a metal plate on his legs, making him stumble forward a few steps towards Sedna, wincing beneath his mask. A second blast caught his knee and made his leg lock up, moments before another shot pummeled him straight in the torso, making him flip over and collapse on the ground.

Purugly then rushed forward, bringing her head low and flipping the Third Imperator onto her shoulders. She swung wide and sent him toppling over, bouncing and skidding across the dirt floor, distanced from his sword. Before he could even get up or move, Purugly pounced and body slammed him with her upper chest, deploying her claws with smooth, silent motion and raking at his chest. He flipped and tumbled away several feet, plates of armor coming loose from him. She let out a roar of blood lust and satisfaction, pacing towards where he had landed tens of feet away.

Mars rounded the corner. Though she looked sickly, breathing unevenly through her nose and being paler than usual, she kept a steady, quick pace, heading towards where the Imperator had landed. His spider-like platform had crashed down to the ground beside him, crawling towards him on half-broken legs, wobbling and whining with metal hisses, instantly stopped as Mars kicked it aside. She planted a boot in the center of the mechanical underbelly, reaching down and grasping a broken, loose leg, pulling hard and tearing it from the socket. Knocking aside the wires that dangled down from it, Mars folded it over her curled fist, resting the length of the metal leg over her knuckles.

As the Imperator clawed at the dirt beside her, trying to get to the resting spider platform, Mars kicked at his shoulder hard, getting a muffled groan from him and flipping him onto his back. She immediately rammed her boot down in the center of his chest, leaning over his struggling form and bringing herself down. She took the fist with the metal leg bracing her knuckles and slammed down, smashing through the smooth case of his mask. A loud cracking rang out, the surface of the mask fracturing. Mars raised her fist high, ignoring the blood that leaked from her knuckles as she rammed her fist into the mask again, then again.

The Imperator, blinded by Mars' attacks, grasped at the ankle of the boot on his chest, gripping it hard and swiftly pushing it away. Mars took a few stumbling steps back to steady herself and ground the momentum of the throw, giving the Imperator time to stiffly put his legs beneath him. The red, off-center point of light flashed and pulsed, trying to refocus and regain his sight.

Avoiding the half-blind grasping of the Imperator as he went for her legs, trying to sit himself up, Mars brought her leg back and kicked him hard in the stomach, ramming the toe of her boot into an area where the armor had come undone. Mars leaned in and swung her fist directly into the center of his mask, getting a loud crack and loosening the mask. The fractured structure of the helmet sagged to the side, and as the wheezing, staggering Imperator tried to stabilize himself, putting a hand out to Mars in mercy, Mars grabbed the collar of his armor and swung the fist in again. Letting out several feral grunts, Mars slammed her fist repeatedly into the mask, popping steel rivets and making the casing shatter and hang together by mere threads.

Mars tossed aside the leg that had braced her knuckles. She jammed her fingers up beneath a plate that held the chin of the mask, then tore upward, splitting the helmet from its loosened seams and sending the mask rolling away.

A mess of black hair fell out, knocked loose from the hair tie that had pulled it back. Struggling, knocking his hair out of his eyes, Ren opened his eyes and looked up at Mars, gasping and trying to stay upright in his armor. A look of shock, mild embarrassment appeared. As Mars lingered over him momentarily, looking confused at his appearance, he launched his arm up into her chest, sending her stumbling backwards. Ren then put his arm beneath him and raised himself up, getting to his feet quickly.

Seeing Mars had fallen down, dazed momentarily from the sudden attack, Sedna took a few steps forward. As Ren, now on his feet, started on Mars for another attack, Sedna let out a shout.

"No! Stop!"

* * *

Kai gasped. Reaching behind his mask, he quickly undid the straps and removed the mask from his head, letting the white fetlocks of his hair fall down in a mess. His eyes went wide, his breath paced. While the other grunts standing beside him were enraptured, he was on a different level of engagement.

"Hey Kai, isn't that your buddy?"

Kai said nothing, watching as the Third Imperator—Ren—stood between Mars and Sedna in the swirling dirt battlefield, making his next decision.


End file.
